Cisco’s Partner Summit 2026 WLAN news puts Thousand Eyes test agents inside Wi-Fi 7 and 6E access points, ships a Model Context Protocol server for the networking platform, and schedules post-quantum over-the-air encryption for 2027. 650 Group reads what that means for network operations.
by Chris DePuy, 650 Group / October 21, 2026 This week at GTC Berlin, Nokia announced the next phase of its AI-RAN program with NVIDIA, moving the technology from platform launch into live-network integration. The work builds on the first commercial AI-RAN platform the two companies shipped in July and… Read More »Nokia and NVIDIA Push AI-RAN Into Live Networks
by Chris DePuy, 650 Group / October 15, 2026 This morning, Verizon and Ericsson announced the first pre-standard 6G field call in the 7 GHz band, completed at a Verizon commercial network site in Concord, California. The confirmed result is an outdoor call on a 400 MHz carrier using a… Read More »Ericsson’s 6G Field Call: Standardization’s Hardware Reality Check
by Chris DePuy, 650 Group / October 14, 2026 This morning, Marvell announced the second-generation Structera X 3406 and 3506 CXL 3.2 memory expanders — the industry’s first six-channel CXL memory expanders aimed at AI inference — as the OCP Global Summit gets under way in San Jose. The company… Read More »Marvell Doubles Down on the AI Memory Wall and the Wires Around It
by Chris DePuy, 650 Group / October 7, 2026 At the OCP Global Summit, which runs October 12–15 in San Jose (OCP Global Summit), we joined Cisco’s data center team for pre-show analyst sessions with Will Eatherton, SVP of Engineering for Data Center & Internet Infrastructure, and Rakesh Chopra, SVP… Read More »Cisco Charts the Pluggable Optics Fork: USFP versus XPO
by Alan Weckel, 650 Group / October 5, 2026 The full interview between 650 Group’s Alan Weckel and Will Eatherton, SVP of Data Center, Internet & Cloud Infrastructure Engineering at Cisco, went up on the 650 Group YouTube channel a few months ago. It was such an interesting conversation that… Read More »AI Backend Network Fabric: Lessons from Cisco Live
IntroductionAI clusters deliver value only when GPUs stay productive. Too many installations still run below 30-50% utilization because networks cannot keep up with job dynamics, tenant sprawl, and constant workload movement. While that number improves with time, those early idle times can quickly move to millions of dollars of waste… Read More »Full Stack Security and AI Job-ID-aware Segmentation: Cisco Raises the Bar for AI Fabric Efficiency
AI networking will ramp as enterprise Wi-Fi access points move into the Wi-Fi 8 era. New Wi-Fi 8 Systems on Chips will incorporate inference capabilities for enhanced channel selection. At the Wi-Fi NOW Conference April 14-16, 2026, vendors discussed AI SOCs importance in the Enterprise Wi-Fi ecosystem.
Introduction AI Ethernet Switching provides the backbone for connecting GPUs. We discussed the different types of AI fabrics and the advantages Ethernet had in our previous blog. The fabrics are key to how Neoclouds and Sovereign Clouds build next-generation AI clusters. Idle GPUs and congestion costs are significant. This blog… Read More »AI Fabrics for Neo and Sovereign Clouds: Why Non-Blocking Design Matters
How Ethernet, AI Infrastructure, and ecosystem partnerships are driving a $70B+ market shift Introduction Networking plays a key role in AI buildouts. From a user’s perspective, we might see this as a faster response time or better results, but behind the scenes, the network plays the vital role of connecting… Read More »Cisco and the Future of AI Networking
