Cisco CEO Cites ‘Significant Uptake’ in Wi-Fi 6 in Prep to Return to Offices

Cisco's “premise” is that enterprise customers will begin returning to physical offices in mid- to late summer, said CEO Chuck Robbins on a fiscal Q2 call Tuesday. As companies look to prepare, “we’ve seen significant uptake in Wi-Fi 6,” he said. “That will require switching infrastructure as people come back to the office and begin to put load on those wireless networks.” Cisco assumes every meeting in the future will be “hybrid,” even after people return to physical workspaces, he said. “You’ll have people in the office, and you’ll have people remote. In order to accommodate that, we suspect most of our customers will be putting video units in every conference room.” Cisco’s “strong momentum” with Webex continued in the quarter ended Jan. 23, said Robbins. The platform served nearly 600 million users, and “we are connecting over 6 billion calls every month,” he said. “Our goal is to deliver a 10X better experience than just in-person interactions.”