5G, Wi-Fi6 and automation are hot topics as the technology industry continues to wrestle with the demands for larger bandwidths. And while some might not believe in the importance of more bandwidth, Gordon Thomson (pictured, left), vice president of global sales, enterprise networking, at Cisco Systems Inc., and Michael Beesley (pictured, right), chief technology officer of service provider networking at Cisco, say otherwise.

They predict  the enterprise will drive the innovation and acceptance of this new bandwidth surge, along with the technology that will surface because of it — igniting more social transformation in the process.

Thomson and Beesley spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in San Diego, California. They discussed 5G, Wi-Fi 6 and automation (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Vellante: We’re going to focus today on 5G and Wi-Fi 6. What are the big trends in the marketplace? 

Thomson: When we moved from 3G to 4G, there was a social transformation around bandwidth — and that was the mobile device, right? The mobile device came along where we could do everything on that mobile device, and that was a real social transformation. The interesting thing was that Wi-Fi wasn’t really linked to that social transformation. What happened over time was organizations gradually recognized the importance of “bring your own device” and 4G — and therefore high-speed Wi-Fi.

What we see this time around is 5G comes along with this massive bandwidth improvement, but at the same time organizations are realizing the importance of Wi-Fi 6, similar speeds. And actually what I think we’re going to see this time round is the business transformation leading the social transformation. The last time it was the public driving the change into the enterprise; this time I think we’re going to see the enterprise drive the change much faster than we thought.

Vellante: Share with us what we need to know about 5G from an architect standpoint. What’s different ,and how’s that going to affect the adoption?

Beesley: There’s the speed gains, but along with that there’s the densification of the [radio access network] that goes with 5G — and for some customers … the opportunity to virtualize that RAN and to replace traditional integrated base band units with virtualized infrastructure on which you can run the infrastructural workloads that are needed in the [RAN] to be able to run that on compute rather than wall gardened, integrated systems. Which opens up the opportunity to just distribute computing storage throughout that network infrastructure — which obviously is used for infrastructure, used for the RAN, and used for the distribution of the mobile core, in particular, as we all embrace, and certainly Cisco’s embracing from an architecture point of view, the separation of the control plane and the user plane for that mobile packet core.

Vellante: Where does automation fit in this whole equation? What are your customers telling you? 

Beesley: It’s a key area of focus, and it’s a key area of innovation for us. When we talk about a 5G network, we do have a tendency to over abstract that. That is a complicated set of technologies — of which Cisco is the market leader in many. We’re leading the industry with regard to the mobile packet core, all of our routing assets, and the full automation suite that you need to be able to deploy and manage a network that is an order of magnitude more dense than we’ve ever seen before — a network that has more equipment deployed further out than we’ve ever had before.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE