Cisco rights the MWC narrative – fiber first, mobile later, as AI agents make minds race

At this year’s MWC, the loudest conversation is about 5G and future 6G networks, but the real AI networking work is happening somewhere less visible: inside and between data centers. As AI models grow and AI agents multiply, the heaviest traffic is east‑west, moving between servers over dense fiber links rather than across mobile networks.

Cisco and a handful of rivals are leaning into this shift. They are building out fiber‑rich data center interconnects to handle AI training and inference workloads now, while treating mobile and edge networks as crucial but later‑stage pieces of the AI stack. In this view, today’s priority is to make the core transport and data center fabric fast and predictable; wider mobile and edge AI services will follow once that foundation is in place.