Cisco introduces private 5G strategy, IoT enhancements at MWC 2022

The company officially announced two new items at Mobile World Congress 2022 yesterday.

As the number of private 5G services continues to grow, Cisco has announced they will be offering a private 5G go-to-market strategy for enterprises. The company also plans to enhance its Internet of Things offerings to help companies manage work remotely. Both of these advancements will work in tandem to provide businesses with the tools necessary to increase productivity in a safe manner. These announcements came yesterday at Mobile World Congress 2022, held in Barcelona.

Private 5G offering

The private 5G solution offered by Cisco is set to use analytics, AI, automation and machine learning to increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of getting work-related items completed on a secure network. The offering will combine elements of Wi-Fi, 5G and IoT together under one complete as-a-service solution, using Cisco’s mobile core technologies to do so. This offering is said to “reduce technical, financial, and operational risks for enterprise private 5G networks”, per the company’s press release.

“Cisco has an unbiased wireless strategy for the future of hybrid work. 5G must work with Wi-Fi and existing IT environments to make digital transformation easy,” said Jonathan Davidson, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group at Cisco. “Businesses continuing their digitization strategies using IoT, analytics, and automation will create significant competitive advantages in value, sustainability, efficiency, and agility. Working together with our global partners to enable those outcomes with Cisco Private 5G is our unique value proposition to the enterprise.”

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The offering will work in tandem with the already existing enterprise systems, including both future and current Wi-Fi versions to help simplify network connectivity. Through Cisco’s management portal, IT teams will be able to monitor activity to easily maintain visibility across a multitude of devices. One part of this offering as well is the subscription, pay-as-you-go model, allowing enterprises to only pay for the services and features they actively use. According to Cisco, businesses will be able to save money with no upfront infrastructure costs and can ramp up services as needed.

Increased productivity was another benefit detailed by the company in its news release, as Cisco’s management of the private 5G network is allowing IT teams not having to learn, design, and operate a complex private network and reducing the amount of waste in time, energy and capital of running a private network.

Enhanced IoT Platform

The other big announcement from Cisco at MWC was its upgraded IoT software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. This enhanced version of the platform is set to allow businesses an easier way to manage low power wide area networks (LPWAN), 4G and 5G IoT connectivity for new and emerging use cases.

“We strive to help our service provider customers enable new services and business outcomes for Mass IoT to simplify data collection from millions of devices,” said Masum Mir, vice president and general manager of Cable, Mobile and IoT at Cisco. “With these enhancements to Cisco IoT Control Center, our customers can expand into the LPWAN market using a proven platform to help a broad range of growing industries realize what the future of mobile IoT can do to transform their business.”

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An upgrade to the scale and capabilities of Cisco’s IoT Control Center is a large part of the company’s IoT enhancements, as the control center will be able to include industrial needs for mass IoT moving forward. The simplified secure connectivity management package will be more widely available for less complex IoT machinery as part of the update. The Cisco IoT Control Center’s update will boast low bandwidth consumption for enterprises, as motionless devices will be connected over 3GPP LPWAN networks. According to Cisco, LPWAN is able to support a swath of IoT cases, allowing remote management of these less complex items to show continuous, real time updates.

The IoT Control Center, much like Cisco’s private 5G service, is available in a pay-as-you-go model, allowing businesses to scale up to address a large range of use cases in a single platform. This single platform will cut down the complexity of monitoring several items at once under the IoT umbrella, allowing enterprises utilizing the IoT Control Center the ability to reduce the amount of capital spent doing so.