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Usha Andra

Marketing Manager

SP Industry

Usha Andra is a senior analyst on Cisco’s SP thought leadership team that is responsible for developing and maintaining leading global research and market intelligence initiatives. She has been one of the key contributors to Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) and Cisco Global Cloud Index (GCI)—the company's ongoing thought leadership effort to forecast and analyze the growth and use of the Internet, IP networks and cloud based networks worldwide. While Usha has been involved in all facets of the above projects, her focus has been on identifying and analyzing trends related to broadband network quality by mobile and fixed technologies, Wi-Fi strategies and cloud application readiness.

Usha has been with the company for 10 years. She started her career with Cisco’s Strategic Marketing Organization focusing on the consumer and home networking segment and then joined the Service Provider marketing organization. Usha has had prior experience in Internet advertising and digital marketing, in creating solutions for full service campaign management. She has earned an M.B.A. degree from San Jose State University, California and has a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Bangalore University, India. Usha has served as an adjunct faculty member at the College of Business at SJSU, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses.

Articles

Connecting the Unconnected: 5G and Wi-Fi 6 Will Play a Pivotal Role in Bridging the Digital Divide

Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona showcased some of the newest mobile innovations along with interactive 5G demos and a bevy of product announcements. In the midst of all this progress and promise, there remains an undeniable fact — there are still Internet access disparities between re…

December 19, 2018

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Tomorrow’s Tactile Internet Requires High-Performing, Pervasive and Secure Networks

During our recent team holiday party, while we were indulging in some delicious festive foods, the discussion quickly moved to recent news around autonomous vehicles and industry efforts to make driverless navigation a safe reality. Our party spread included decadent chocolate and red velvet cupcake…

Network Security in the Age of Hyperconnectivity: Pervasive, Proactive, and Persistent Protection is Essential to Thwart …

Securing today’s digital content has become more challenging, as there are more endpoints and wide area networks (WAN) to protect than ever before. There will be 27.1 billion networked devices/connections by 2021, up from 17.1 billion in 2016 globally (according to the latest Cisco Visual Networking…

The Latest Mobile Makeover: Why and How Unlimited Data Plans Have Re-emerged

Globally, mobile data usage and traffic are on the rise. As a result, mobile network operators (MNOs) are adjusting their offers and billing structures to accommodate user behaviors. More than a quarter of plans tracked in the third quarter of 2016 had allowances of 10 Gigabytes and above according…

February 24, 2017

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5G Performance: More than an upgrade and potential for a mobile blockbuster

Commercial deployments for 5G are expected to launch in 2020 and to be available in every major global mobile market by 2021. Ovum Informa Telecoms and Media predicts that more than 50 operators will be offering 5G services in close to 30 countries by the end of 2021. However, the majority of 5G sub…

February 13, 2017

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Wi-Fi Wanderlust: What’s happening with the “other” mobile technology?

This week, Cisco released the 2017 Mobile Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast. Not surprisingly, most people focus on the cellular (2G, 3G, 4G and 5G) aspects of the forecast. But there are also some rather exciting insights that can be drawn from our analysis of “the other” mobile technology – W…

January 13, 2017

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Here’s Why Today’s Networks Can’t Be Run Like It’s 1999

New and Emerging Applications Require Broadband Innovation While the turn of the century and the hoopla that surrounded Y2K was nearly two decades ago, for many of us, it feels like the very recent past. As the year 2000 began, mobile carriers were just starting to offer data and texting capabilitie…

December 20, 2016

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Tis the Season to Secure Your Devices (and Things)

Today, global headlines are focused on alleged government-led breaches of U.S. political parties. But the threat of nefarious online activity goes beyond the email and communications of elected officials. The large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyberattack that flooded the servers of Do…

November 18, 2016

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The Cloud Journey: Moving from Adoption to Greater Optimization and Utilization

Cloud computing has become the virtual bedrock for today’s business and consumer applications as well as future offerings on the service horizon. Cloud plays a pivotal role in digital transformation and has literally reshaped global data centers. While this is widely understood, I believe the real c…