Cisco Podcast Network

Ian was out town, and asked for a quick update on Kat's Singapore trip. Kat sent a voice memo. This is that voice memo.

Inside: the results, the chaos, the McLaren of it all, and a few lessons for anyone who’s ever been told an event is “basically just a fancy dinner.”

Kat didn't want this to air, so tune in!

Check out Cisco's SMB products here: https://www.cisco.com/site/us/en/solutions/small-business/index.html#tabs-9da71fbd27-item-1288c79d71-tab

In the pluggable optics industry every next generation is led by countless presentations and proposals at standards bodies meetings along with lots of lab development and testing behind the scenes. Right now the industry has its sights set on 3.2 terabit transceivers with 400 Gb per electrical lane. All those meetings and all that testing are happening as we speak.

Today I am joined by John Calvin, Strategic Planner and Datacom Technology Lead at Keysight.

John has been bridging the measurement science gaps of emerging telecom and datacom development efforts for 20 years. He has chaired multiple physical layer interoperability working groups and is currently serving as a contributing member to IEEE 802.3, OIF-CEI, InfiniBand, and PCIe development efforts. John holds a BSEE from Washington State University, and his graduate level studies are in signal processing from Stanford University.

In Episode 69 we continue our conversation with John. We get into the measurement science and precision instruments needed to characterize signals at femtosecond timescales.

John has very generously made himself available for your follow-up questions. You can find him at IEEE 802.3 technical forums or you can email him at [email protected].

Please follow the Cisco Podcast Network on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! Better yet, leave a review on Apple podcasts. Remember you're listening to the Cisco Optics Podcast, which is part of the Cisco Podcast Network where you can find other great Cisco podcasts too.

If you want to listen on a website, go to optics.podcastpage.io.

We also have educational videos on youtube. Just go to youtube.com and search on Cisco Optics.

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In this episode, we interview Christos Hassis, wireless consulting engineer at Cisco Poland. He tells us about his Wi-Fi site survey engagements and in particular an engagement in a car factory where all the data looked good on the surface and previous engineer said there was no problem but the customer begged to differ. He developped a custom MCP server to discuss with his site survey results, find out the problem and explain the improvement plan to the customer.

In this episode of The Cisco AI Insights Podcast, hosts Rafael Herrera and Sónia Marques are joined by Isabelle Ogland,  a Cisco Leader in AI Solutions Development and Technical Architecture, to explore TypeSafe AI’s “JEV”, a “system one” model designed to make fast, focused decisions rather than generate lengthy responses. Together, they examine the idea behind building “prod, not God”: creating AI for practical, affordable automation in real-world workflows.

The discussion explores how JEV uses context to answer structured questions, from yes-or-no checks and predefined choices to scores and confidence estimates. Isabelle explains how calibrated probabilities could help teams decide when to automate a step and when to seek human review. The conversation also examines TypeSafe AI’s reported speed and cost advantages, while asking important questions about comparisons with general-purpose language models, independent validation, and the work required to set up complex workflows. Could specialized decision models and LLMs be more useful together than either is alone?

A special thank you to TypeSafe AI for developing the blog introducing JEV. If you’d like to learn more about JEV, read TypeSafe AI’s blog here: https://typesafe.ai/blog/introducing-system-one-models-and-jev

Renowned security and cybersecurity expert Amy Chang sits down with AB to unpack AI threat research, prompt-injection risks, and securing critical human-in-the-loop governance.

In the pluggable optics industry every next generation is led by countless presentations and proposals at standards bodies meetings along with lots of lab development and testing behind the scenes. Right now the industry has its sights set on 3.2 terabit transceivers with 400 Gb per electrical lane. All those meetings and all that testing are happening as we speak.

Today I am joined by John Calvin, Strategic Planner and Datacom Technology Lead at Keysight.

John has been bridging the measurement science gaps of emerging telecom and datacom development efforts for 20 years. He has chaired multiple physical layer interoperability working groups and is currently serving as a contributing member to IEEE 802.3, OIF-CEI, InfiniBand, and PCIe development efforts. John holds a BSEE from Washington State University, and his graduate level studies are in signal processing from Stanford University.

In Episode 68 we continue our conversation with John. We get into the limits of copper and emerging alternatives such as plastic waveguides and hollow-core fiber.

John has very generously made himself available for your follow-up questions. You can find him at IEEE 802.3 technical forums or you can email him at [email protected].

Please follow the Cisco Podcast Network on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! Better yet, leave a review on Apple podcasts. Remember you're listening to the Cisco Optics Podcast, which is part of the Cisco Podcast Network where you can find other great Cisco podcasts too.

If you want to listen on a website, go to optics.podcastpage.io.

We also have educational videos on youtube. Just go to youtube.com and search on Cisco Optics.

Related links

Additional resources

Intro music

Outro music

Cisco has been running agentic systems for more than 18 months. Our biggest lessons weren't about models. They were about data, governance, and human judgment. So, how did we do it?

In this episode of Scaling AI in the Enterprise, our expert panel takes you inside Cisco's own AgenticOps transformation. Learn why scale and machine-speed threats make it essential now and what to get right before you start, and why your orchestrator can't be an oracle.

Host: Jack Hampson, Director of Product Management, Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

Guests:

Learn more about Cisco Customer Experience; Read our blogs and visit Cisco.com

Ian's training for a marathon (well now ran it...), Kat's got an AI agent basically stalking her own accounts, and somehow they still end up debating handwriting.

But for real, they're picking up where last week left off—actually using AI at work, not just talking about it. We're talking morning briefings, customer tracking, mining meeting notes for the action items you definitely missed because you were scrolling, and the question that matters: "What am I not seeing?"

Kat walks through the prompts that are actually saving her time, Ian has a minor revelation about what he could be doing with his meeting summaries, and his refrigerator calendar? Come for the shenanigans, stay for the real, relatable help with using AI.

Check out AI solutions for SMBs here: https://www.cisco.com/site/us/en/solutions/small-business/ai-enabled-networking/index.html

Ian and Kat set out to talk about AI this week. They do not talk about AI. Instead, they end up defending their sweatshirts, debating when your camera actually needs to be on, and wrestling with a surprisingly heated question: can you protect a lunch break, or will someone always schedule right over it?

Kat's settling into a global role now, which means early mornings, late night (sounds like a good name for pilates sock company...) calls, and the special kind of calendar Tetris that comes with trying to find a meeting slot across three continents. Ian admits he's way too quick to shuffle his own time around to make life easier for everyone else...and yeah, he knows that's probably a problem.

Then they dig into the real stuff: how to actually be available without being always available, the unwritten rules of WFH life, and whether any of this is sustainable. The AI conversation? That's genuinely happening next week. Probably.

In the pluggable optics industry every next generation is led by countless presentations and proposals at standards bodies meetings along with lots of lab development and testing behind the scenes. Right now the industry has its sights set on 3.2 terabit transceivers with 400 Gb per electrical lane. All those meetings and all that testing are happening as we speak.

Today I am joined by John Calvin, Strategic Planner and Datacom Technology Lead at Keysight.

John has been bridging the measurement science gaps of emerging telecom and datacom development efforts for 20 years. He has chaired multiple physical layer interoperability working groups and is currently serving as a contributing member to IEEE 802.3, OIF-CEI, InfiniBand, and PCIe development efforts. John holds a BSEE from Washington State University, and his graduate level studies are in signal processing from Stanford University.

In Episode 67 we continue our conversation with John. We get into how equalization, forward error correction, and increasingly sophisticated signaling keep Ethernet scaling.

John has very generously made himself available for your follow-up questions. You can find him at IEEE 802.3 technical forums or you can email him at [email protected].

Please follow the Cisco Podcast Network on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! Better yet, leave a review on Apple podcasts. Remember you're listening to the Cisco Optics Podcast, which is part of the Cisco Podcast Network where you can find other great Cisco podcasts too.

If you want to listen on a website, go to optics.podcastpage.io.

We also have educational videos on youtube. Just go to youtube.com and search on Cisco Optics.

Related links

Additional resources

Intro music

Outro music