Cisco unveils ‘Internet of the Future’ strategy; rolls out new silicon, router products

Networking giant Cisco has unveiled a new strategy to build next-generation internet technology. Dubbed as ‘Internet for the Future’ technology, the strategy is centered around development and investments in three key technology areas - silicon, optics, and software.

The company’s offerings will include Cisco Silicon One, new Cisco 8000 Series and flexible business model options, to support its future plans, it said in a statement.

Cisco Silicon One is a new switching and routing application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), designed for the 5G internet era, which will serve anywhere in the network and be used in any form factor. 

The San Jose, California-based company claimed the first Cisco Silicon One Q100 model surpasses the 10 terabits of bandwidth per second (Tbps) routing milestone for network bandwidth without sacrificing programmability, buffering, power efficiency, scale or feature flexibility.

Silicon Q100 is the first chip in the Silicon One family. It's a programmable ASIC with the ability to provide more than 10 Tbps.

The Cisco 8000 series is the first platform built with Cisco Silicon One Q100. It helps service providers and webscale companies reduce costs of building and operating mass-scale networks for the 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), and internet of things (IoT) applications. The new Cisco 8000 series is set to reduce the cost of building and operating mass scale networks to run digital applications and services such as 5G, video, and cloud, the company said.

Saudi Arabia-based telecom services provider Saudi Telecom Company (STC) became the first firm to deploy the Cisco 8000 series technology.

The company’s new flexible business model was first established with Cisco’s Optics portfolio, followed by the disaggregation of the Cisco IOS-XR software, and now includes Cisco Silicon One. 

The new model is highly adaptable and offers customers a choice of components, white box, or integrated systems to build their networks, the statement added. 

Cisco further said that it is investing organically in optics as port rates have increased from 100G to 400G and beyond. Therefore, optics become an increasingly larger portion of the cost to build and operate internet infrastructure.

"Our latest solutions in silicon, optics, and software represent the continued innovation we're driving that helps our customers stay ahead of the curve and create new, ground-breaking experiences for their customers and end-users for decades to come,” said Chuck Robbins, chairman, and CEO of Cisco.