Stephen Speirs

Co-authored by David Roberts and Bhavik Adhvaryu. The race to 5G is on! Market and Markets recently estimated that the market for 5G service provider-delivered services will grow to $123B by 2025, compounding at 18% annually. Both 4G and 5G technologies rely heavily on new cloud-based infrastructure…

Lots has been happening on our 5G RuralFirst co-innovation, Country Digitization Acceleration (CDA) project being run by Cisco UK & Ireland. Within Cisco UK & Ireland, it is the Cisco Innovation team that is leading this ambitious 29 partner consortium. My own part of Cisco, the Customer Exp…

The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is a collaborative telecom community. Launched in February 2016, TIP was started with the goal of accelerating the pace of innovation in the telecommunications industry.  This year Cisco is proud to be a Gold Sponsor at the upcoming TIP Summit – running on 16th…

It’s been a quick year so far and my follow up to part 1 of this blog is long overdue.  Back in December last year, Cisco led a 30 partner consortium to enter a UK government competition, to design, build and run innovative 5G Testbed and Trial programs. The government expected that consortia would…

Recently I’ve had the (very fortunate) opportunity to participate in many 5G planning meetings, involving customers, academia and public sector organizations.  Believe it or not, even among such distinguished company, a recurring theme among the participants is “What really is 5G?” 5G is about High-…

“You’re doing … what?!  And … where?!  5G?  What’s that? And why in Orkney?!” Last weekend I took holiday Friday and Monday – including my Cisco “Birthday Day Off”– to travel to Switzerland for some early season skiing with friends. Inevitably we talked occasionally about work, and I mentioned…

Recently I blogged about how Cisco are working with ScotRail (the train operator) and Network Rail Telecom (the track operator) in Scotland to deliver a trial of the world’s fastest in-train WiFi, an evolution of work done earlier on “Project SWIFT”.  I also described a school of thought that sugges…

  This year’s UK budget day (23rd November 2017) has been an interesting day for technology. Technology plans were central topics – including a significant government 5G investment.  As my Cisco UK colleague Matt Houlihan blogged earlier, Cisco is already working with Government to ensure that…

A while back, I blogged on a survey that market research firm Ovum ran to help us with market research in NFV and SDN professional services.  While it wasn’t our principal objective in this survey to measure competitive position, we did receive some very interesting competitive perceptions fro…