- Cisco is working closely with operators to define the market and deliver enterprise-focused platforms
- Operators face a 5-10 year journey to autonomous networks, with cultural changes being a bigger hurdle than technology
- Cisco’s Mobility Services Platform helps operators turn network assets into enterprise-ready services
In the journey to autonomous networks, Cisco is no longer a vendor/supplier to telecom operators – it’s a partner.
That’s a subtle but important distinction, according to Masum Mir, SVP and general manager of Cisco's Provider Mobility business, who spoke with Fierce during last week’s Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona.
“We became their business partners,” he said. “We are defining the market together. We are very bullish about the growth potential for all operators to serve the public sector and enterprises more effectively.”
Cisco’s work with T-Mobile
Cisco itself for the past several years has been on a mission to help service providers take the journey toward autonomous networking. By way of example, he said Cisco's been working “very, very closely” with T-Mobile on this voyage.
T-Mobile is a fast mover in the sense it was first to roll out 5G Standalone (SA) and a 5G Advanced network nationwide. Cisco has been providing the packet core and data center technology as well as routing infrastructure. “It’s all software, but that software runs on a reliable, secure data center fabric,” he said.
Broadly speaking, for most service providers, it’s a five- to 10-year journey to achieve a fully autonomous network – and there’s a good reason everything is taking so long.
“Technology is not the problem. We all have the technology,” he said. “It’s the culture. You have to do a cultural shift. You have to do an operational shift on how you run your business today, how you are organized. That transformation is going to take longer than the technology.”
He pointed out something that we heard quite a few times last week: “Telecoms are not software companies. Telecoms have regulatory requirements and telecoms have 30 years of legacy,” he said.
Considering all their legacy baggage, is it even feasible to get telecom operators to move as fast as software companies? “If telecom embraces software, then yes,” he said.
He pointed to Japan’s Rakuten, a greenfield mobile operator that started out as a software company. Thanks in part to its strong software focus, Rakuten surpassed 10 million mobile subscribers at the end of December 2025.
Rakuten also happens to be a poster child for open RAN, a technology of which Cisco is a big proponent. Cisco provided the virtualized packet core for Rakuten.
Speaking of open RAN, Cisco is one of the founding members of the Linux Foundation’s Open Centralized Unit Distributed Unit (OCUDU) Ecosystem Foundation that launched a week ago.
The OCUDU is focused on developing and coordinating open source software for the CU and DU parts of an open RAN network; it’s designed to be a complement to 3GPP and industry organizations like the O-RAN Alliance and AI-RAN Alliance.
Cisco’s role is to make sure existing transport, IP and core networks adapt to a more software-driven, open RAN environment without sacrificing security or operational stability, he said.
Enterprise platforms and AI economy
A popular question in the 5G-to-6G era is: Where’s the new revenue?
“Time to new revenue has been a challenge,” Mir said. “The hypothesis that we have been working with is it’s a problem of not taking your telecom assets and presenting that asset to the enterprise as a platform to run your business.”
In other words, it boils down to a lack of “platformization,” he said. Progress has been made in areas like CAMARA APIs, but that’s not enough for enterprises or the public sector to consider the communication service provider network as a platform on which to build and run their businesses.
Cisco started working on this problem a few years back with what it calls its Mobility Services Platform, which is designed to help operators package network connectivity capabilities into enterprise-ready services. “It is a platform for mobile operators to serve their enterprises more effectively,” he said.
Based on the “AI everywhere” messages blaring throughout the MWC, it’s clear that telecom operators want to be smack dab in the middle of the AI revolution – and Cisco is right there with them.
“We want to make sure that we are part of the transition that telecom operators are going through and they will be going through for the AI economy,” he said. “We are not going to be a bystander. We will be actively participating in this journey, both in the ecosystem and partnering with operators.”
Read all of our coverage from Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona here.