Agile capabilities allow CSPs to adapt to fluctuating AI demands, ensuring uninterrupted performance during peak traffic
Facilitating on-demand bandwidth for AI gives carriers a new revenue stream, turning a bandwidth bane into a potential boon
A low-energy launch of the promising new architecture suggests some internal ambiguity at Cisco over the company’s focus
The sudden popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) has precipitated a feeding frenzy in the communications industry, as vendors scurry to add AI capabilities to their portfolios. On the buy side of our industry, however, the technology has created a crisis for carriers.
The problem is the overwhelming volume of AI traffic flooding carrier networks — which is growing at over 50% year-over-year in some markets. Most of this AI traffic originates from OTT operators and hyperscalers, who make serious cheddar from AI. However, this traffic travels over networks owned by carriers, who don’t. This creates an existential challenge for carriers, who are still recovering from the costs of upgrading to 5G networks — many of which have not yielded a return on their investment. Now, they face the necessity of upgrading capacity yet again, this time with optical equipment, without any clear business case to justify the expense.
Cisco’s Agile Services Networking Architecture is designed to solve the problem by enabling carriers to build networks that can scale up and down automagically in response to the mercurial demands of AI traffic flows — and charge a premium for that capability.
Take the example of a company training a large language model (LLM). The process will take about a month, using computing resources distributed across multiple cloud data centers. During this time, the customer needs massive bandwidth to support terabits of training data. With Cisco's solution, a carrier can automatically scale network capacity up to meet the high demands of the customer’s LLM training, ensuring optimal performance across all locations, and then scale it back once training is complete.
So how does it work? Agile Services Networking merges the IP and optical network layers into a single virtual digital construct, reducing complexity while enhancing network visibility, scalability, and responsiveness. The core technology driving this approach is Cisco’s home-grown Silicon One application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which feature energy-saving capabilities that can significantly lower carrier operating expenses.
For such a strong concept, the Agile Services Network Architecture was launched with little fanfare at Cisco’s customer event in Amsterdam in February. Still, carriers seem to like it, as this rather good case study with Swisscom indicates.
Cisco’s Agile Services Network Architecture has plenty of competition. All of the leading communications vendors—and HPE—are offering technology solutions designed to allow carriers to diversify their old business model (selling bandwidth) to a new business model (selling bandwidth bundled with value).
That’s a non-trivial transition for carriers, many of whom have been used to selling capacity for half a century.
Not all vendors consistently convey the advantages of this new archetype to their customers.
Nokia’s analyst briefing on its optical networking portfolio at the OFC event in San Francisco last week had a retro big bandwidth flavor, and my softball question about what advice Nokia could give to carriers struggling to build a business case for buying optical equipment to help hyperscalers make more money went unanswered by its execs (note: they could have pointed me to Nokia’s AVA data suite, which is pretty cool).
Cisco itself has not done a convincing job of explaining its value proposition to carriers in recent years.
That’s probably due to internal tension within the company over what its priorities should be: enterprise, carrier, hyperscaler — or just yelling “AI” loudly and hoping Wall Street is listening.
They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but there’s definitely a thing called “not doing any marketing.” Cisco’s Agile Services Networking Architecture is a return to form for America’s largest communications vendor. Having created a compelling way for carriers to make money in the age of AI, Cisco should be shouting about its Agile Services Networking Architecture from the virtual hilltops.
Steve Saunders is a British-born communications analyst, investor and digital media entrepreneur with a career spanning decades.
Op-eds from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff are opinion pieces that do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.