In this episode of Carrier 2.0, host Steve Saunders talks with Masum Mir, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Provider Mobility business, about the next wave of transformation for carriers.
Masum explains how AI’s “data gravity” is reshaping the network, why IT and OT convergence is accelerating, and how service providers can claim a central role in the new AI-driven economy. From breaking internal silos to bridging enterprise and carrier ecosystems, this conversation explores what it really takes to move beyond connectivity and into intelligence.
Steve Saunders:
The network is the backbone of everything, but is it ready for the future? Carrier 2.0 isn't about hype, it's about the future of connectivity direct from the carriers who are creating it. Today I'm speaking with Masum Mir. He's the SVP and GM of Cisco's Provider Mobility business.
Masum Mir:
Think about your enterprise and the business's need. There's something that is really very close to you, and work backward from there and try to start with the asset that you already have. You don't have to go greenfield. Never forget that. You always have to question yourself that, am I building silos or am I actually building all these offers on a horizontal platform?
Steve Saunders:
Hey Masum, how are you?
Masum Mir:
I'm doing great Steve. Thank you for having me.
Steve Saunders:
We're in the middle of this big shift where so much of what's happening in communications is no longer about connecting consumers, it's about connecting the physical world to the digital world, isn't it? And for me that means a lot of things that are heavy industry. Do you agree with that and what are you seeing?
Masum Mir:
I completely agree. I think this is the time we have connected almost 80, 90 percentile of the people. We are at a point of technology, AI, everything coming together, physical world and digital world coming together and the telecommunication infrastructure is going to play such a vital and critical role going forward.
Steve Saunders:
So that's the answer to the existential question that service providers are posing to themselves, isn't it? What do we want to be when we grow up in the 21st century? How can they best position themselves to be active participants in that biome?
Masum Mir:
The how part is quite tricky. So you have a lot of responsibility and liability connecting people and when you are in need an emergency, you rely on the communication. So we have that. We maintain a five nine reliability infrastructure and communication. We take it for granted that communication services always up and running.
Speaker 3:
I'm not getting any reception.
Me neither. No bars.
It's all right. I'll put a message in a bottle.
Masum Mir:
But right now we're at a point that we also have to go and leap and we have to transform ourselves so that the how part is how we are going to go and do what we are doing and also capture the next opportunity for connecting the digital world and participate on the value chain.
Steve Saunders:
What advice do you give to your customers, your service provider customers or mobile service provider customers right now? Because more than just the five nines, isn't it?
Masum Mir:
Start to think more outside in. Take what we have learned connecting the entire population of a country and build for things that is beyond just people connectivity. Start small. Think about your enterprise and the business's need. There's something that is really very close to you and work backward from there and try to start with the asset that you already have. You don't have to go green field.
Steve Saunders:
It's time to separate the signal from the noise. I'm going to give you some examples of technologies which are getting a lot of tension at the moment or people are talking about and I want you to tell me whether they're signal, i.e. they're real or noise, in which case they're more sort of hyped. Okay. Quantum computing.
Masum Mir:
Noise now.
Steve Saunders:
Very good. 6G.
Masum Mir:
It's a signal.
Steve Saunders:
Artificial general intelligence or sort of human level AI.
Masum Mir:
Too early.
Steve Saunders:
Yeah. Okay. Are there any other technologies that people are talking about now that you think are probably too early as well?
Masum Mir:
A seamless broadband on LEO and non-terrestrial satellite networks is little far out.
Steve Saunders:
Really, we're really just on the same page here. I was literally just about to say space-based communications networks.
Speaker 3:
ET phone home.
ET phone home.
Steve Saunders:
That's very interesting. There is this dividing line still between the telecommunications network and the vertical networks which exist within enterprises and vertical industry. Do you think we can get to a point where we have more of a sort of connected kingdom as it were, without all of those domains where the horizontal approach of telecom and cloud can move up into those OT environments and perhaps even unify IT and OT?
Masum Mir:
Very good question, Steve. Actually in the industries, IT and OT starting to come together because when you go to enterprise and critical infrastructure security, it cannot be built on. It has to be designed in. I think many of the conversation in large industries, the IT, OT and the security posture for everything is starting to come together. But how does our telecom providers start to participate in this conversation is super important, but you have to actually think about those verticals as the IT, OT in the enterprise comes together. How you show up differently, how we start to think about solving the end customer's problem more holistically. I think that thinking is something that we have to embrace more and start small. Maybe start with few verticals where your brand and your presence is already strong. Start there, but never forget that you always have to question yourself that am I building silos or am I actually building all these offers on a horizontal platform?
Steve Saunders:
I mean, it's a huge opportunity for Cisco, isn't it? Because service providers are going to need a lot of help beyond the network and above the network with the integration which is involved with what you're describing. And also Cisco has this incredibly strong security portfolio through development and acquisition. Do you have to reorganize Cisco itself in order to serve those markets?
Masum Mir:
So we are definitely moving in this direction, that we are breaking our own silos. But I think the biggest opportunity we have and where we can partner with communication service provider is creating that bridge. We are sitting on the front row with many of these enterprises who are going through this transformation. IT, OT coming together, security getting infused into their industrial operation, IT operation, their WAN operation. Not only that as they start to run on cloud, so we are already doing it. We think we can also now be the bridge between what enterprise is doing, what CSP can offer, but also connecting it back into how the AI revolution happening on the AI factories.
Steve Saunders:
Let's speak some truth to power. The new digital economy will be an AI economy, so which countries the best place to build and profit from it? Well, America clearly has the best AI technology, but it actually lags behind many other countries in the critical infrastructure needed to support it, including the water supply to cool IT and a grid to power it. The US government recently produced an AI action plan that sets out a strategy to fix those problems. Let's take a look. Nice big binder. What's inside? Well, not that much actually. It's a 28-page document and I see we've got a couple of pages here left intentionally blank. Oh, and this is interesting. Tip from an old writer like me, if you don't have that much to say and make sure you made that title really huge. Take up a lot of room.
Speaker 3:
What I do is I pretend to be the person I'm portraying in the film or play.
Yeah.
You're confused.
Steve Saunders:
Well, it's not just the length that is the problem here. If you actually read the plan, and believe me, it doesn't take you that long. You'll see that it doesn't any numbers. It doesn't say how much will be spent on what or when. And that's very strange because federal government is already spending over a hundred billion dollars a year on AI with the vast majority going towards military applications. It's also spending maybe 15 billion on improving utilities. But overall, it's a classic disconnect. The money is being spent over there somewhere. The pork is being distributed, but it's not connected to the strategy. And the reality is that this thing isn't a plan, it's press release.
None of the aspirations contained in this document will be realized before the end of President Trump's term in office. Now, other countries may not have the same level of AI expertise in the code, in the chips, but they're doing a much better job of creating the critical foundation for an artificial intelligence-based economy. China's AI strategy is included in its five-year plans and it goes all the way back to 2006. Here they are. Hefty. The European Union also has invested in a similar level of preparation. The US is unquestionably behind most developed countries in building the infrastructure for AI and without a significant shift in policy, that threatens its economic leadership in the future.
One of the things that I really have noticed in our industry in the last couple of years is there's a very intense focus on data centers and the core of the network, but I think the more critical area for this global transformation, which you and I are talking about here Masum, is at the edge and that is the territory which is owned by service providers. But in order to enable this new AI-enabled digital global economy, they're going to have to make some changes to the edge, aren't they?
Masum Mir:
So today AI has data gravity. Let's face it. To build and train AI, you need a lot of data. As you train AI, it also produces lot of data and the models are becoming more and more sophisticated. The systems are becoming a lot more capable. So it's just getting bigger and bigger and there's tremendous amount of investment going on around the world on building these models.
Speaker 3:
Boy, that escalated quickly.
Masum Mir:
So that is step number one. This is why I say that there is data gravity in AI and AI is also creating a lot more data as you create knowledge out of data, I say, "Look, this whole generative AI is taking massive amounts of data and creating insight and actionable insight and knowledge." What is next? Now we have to consume it. So to consume it, this is a massive opportunity for communication service providers. By the way, even today, there is a problem on the power density that the space required for this massive amount of data centers that is being built for AI training and the models. CSPs actually have a unique opportunity right now to interconnect those massive AI data centers and many of the CSPs are already participating, leveraging the investment they already had in their fiber footprint. These models are going to be fine-tuned and also trained, and that needs to happen more and more closer to what the action is happening.
It's not like huge chat. We believe this is the era of when from chat, it goes into agentics. There will be agentic application built and they will be talking to each other. It is now going to come and put new type of constraint and demand on the network. And this is communication network and we believe mobile is going to get hit first because more and more the physical world starting to adopt these agents that's AI backed. They do a lot of processing at the edge, but then it goes and talk to the mega data centers and AI factories. This is where the key decision needs to be made. How communication service providers start to prepare that infrastructure to be aware of these new traffic types. That needs proximity. CSPs as a unique opportunity to turn their footprint, to host these super agents that will interconnect multiple of these agents and see it as the hub between the agents sitting at the very edge of the network and the AI factories that is going to be highly concentrated around the world.
Speaker 3:
I'm going to give the people what they want.
Steve Saunders:
A bold prediction. Please, Masum. Something that you believe about the future of telecom that perhaps most people aren't aware of yet.
Masum Mir:
My bold prediction is the big winners in telecom that will be, not everyone is going to be big winners, but big winners will see majority of their revenue shifted from consumer revenue to business to business revenue.
Steve Saunders:
Are you confident that your service provider customers can be active participants in the AI economy? You feel that they're building strategies to do that now?
Masum Mir:
Many of our service provider customers are quite serious about it. They're making the investment and like everyone, like every other industry service provider has an opportunity adopted fairly fast for their own operational efficiency and customer relationship that's here and now, but don't stop. Continue to invest and build a foundation not only for your own efficiency, but be on the value equation of the AI traffic and agentics. We should be more prepared than reacting to these changes because we have seen over the last 18 months, the pace of change that we have seen in the AI ecosystem, I don't think we have seen this type of rapid change in last 30 years.
Steve Saunders:
Yeah, it's extraordinary time. Very exciting. Here's what one commentator had to say about AI hallucinations.
Speaker 4:
There are several things we don't know, but all the things that we do know are bad.
Steve Saunders:
That was Carrier 2.0. Please subscribe, share, or just join the conversation, because the future of telecom is happening today.