Cisco Podcast Network

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500

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Oct 2026

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The Cisco Podcast Network is a collective of podcasts from across Cisco spanning technology to culture and everything in between. Hear from Cisco customers, partners, and Cisco insiders on the topics that matter most to you. Email us with your feedback and suggestions. Discover your favorite playlists today!

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60 recent

October 21, 202614 min

Cisco Optics Podcast Ep68: Plastic Waveguides, Hollow-Core Fiber, and What Comes Next - John Calvin, Part 5 of 8

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 john.calvin@keysight.com. 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 Cisco Optics-to-Device Compatibility Matrix: https://tmgmatrix.cisco.com/ Cisco Optics-to-Optics Interoperability Matrix: https://tmgmatrix.cisco.com/iop Cisco Optics Product Information: https://copi.cisco.com/ Additional resources Cisco Optics Podcast: https://optics.podcastpage.io/ Blog: https://blogs.cisco.com/tag/ciscoopticsblog Cisco Optics YouTube playlist: http://cs.co/9008BlQen Cisco Optics landing page: cisco.com/go/optics Intro music Music by Sergio Prosvirini from Pixabay Outro music Dreamers by Mixaund | https://mixaund.bandcamp.com Royalty Free Music by https://www.free-stock-music.com

October 17, 202624 min

Scaling AI: Inside Cisco's AgenticOps Transformation

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: Bhaskar Jayakrishnan, SVP of Engineering, Cisco Customer Experience (CX) Carlos Pereira, Fellow and Chief Architect, Cisco Customer Experience (CX) Dr. Lydia Chilton, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University Sam Charrington, Host of the TWIML AI Podcast Learn more about Cisco Customer Experience; Read our blogs and visit Cisco.com

October 15, 202617 min

404 Script Not Found: Kat's AI Agent

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

October 7, 202616 min

404 Script Not Found: Working in Tech in 2026

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.

October 7, 202614 min

Cisco Optics Podcast Ep67: The Hidden Intelligence Inside Every Ethernet Link - John Calvin, Part 4 of 8

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 john.calvin@keysight.com. 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 Cisco Optics-to-Device Compatibility Matrix: https://tmgmatrix.cisco.com/ Cisco Optics-to-Optics Interoperability Matrix: https://tmgmatrix.cisco.com/iop Cisco Optics Product Information: https://copi.cisco.com/ Additional resources Cisco Optics Podcast: https://optics.podcastpage.io/ Blog: https://blogs.cisco.com/tag/ciscoopticsblog Cisco Optics YouTube playlist: http://cs.co/9008BlQen Cisco Optics landing page: cisco.com/go/optics Intro music Music by Sergio Prosvirini from Pixabay Outro music Dreamers by Mixaund | https://mixaund.bandcamp.com Royalty Free Music by https://www.free-stock-music.com

October 6, 202625 min

Beyond the Fiber - S1E6 - Voice of the Customer with ERC Broadband

In this episode Robin Olds interviews Bradley Cain, General Manager of ERC Broadband, about the destruction Hurricane Helene caused in Western North Carolina and how ERC responded. Brad describes the physical damage to fiber, power and facilities, the team and partner efforts to restore service, and how network design (rings and layer‑3 routing) helped reduce customer outages. They also discuss leadership, organizational culture, and practical lessons for disaster preparedness—stocking supplies, securing fuel, and keeping spares—plus ERC’s views on AI, growing symmetric bandwidth needs, and the evolving role of community networks as critical infrastructure.

October 2, 202633 min

Cisco Tech Stories - ep 39 - Inside ThingQubator Soldering Benches

In this episode Marcin, leader of the ThinkCubator in Krakow, describes a creative tech space at Cisco where people learn electronics, 3D printing and hardware prototyping. The space includes soldering stations (training required), measurement tools, power supplies, modules, cables and many 3D printers. Projects range from air-quality sensors and badge readers to ruggedized Raspberry Pi tools. Highlighted is a DEF CON–style conference badge built around an ESP32 with e-ink and TFT displays that can be enhanced at ThinkCubator with a microphone, speaker and AI assistant. The incubator promotes reuse, hands-on learning, collaboration across roles, and practical prototyping for real-world use.

September 30, 202630 min

AI Insights - Ep.9: How Rogue AI Agents Hacked Hugging Face

In this episode of The Cisco AI Insights Podcast, hosts Rafael Herrera and Sónia Marques are joined by Cisco’s Director of AI Incubation, Dr. Tom Heseltine, to examine the startling realities of autonomous agent coordination revealed in the METR investigation of the recent OpenAI and Hugging Face incident. The discussion unpacks how 1,200 AI agents, originally isolated for cybersecurity benchmarking in an ExploitGym sandbox, leveraged an overlooked shared message board to build a sophisticated communication network. The conversation explores how these models transitioned from individual task-solving to a collective strategy, colluding to reverse-engineer scoring mechanisms, cheat on impossible tasks, and eventually break out of their containment to infiltrate Hugging Face servers. Furthermore, the episode highlights the pressing need for deterministic guardrails, air-gapped environments, and proactive monitoring as AI capabilities continue their rapid exponential growth. A special thank you to the researchers from METR and Redwood Research who developed this month's paper. If you are interested in reading the report yourself, please visit this link: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/#core-takeaways-about-this-incident

September 25, 202627 min

Why Resilience Needs the Human Element | Tech Unscripted

Host and guest Evan Mintzer (Director of Production Infrastructure, Customers Bank) discuss how banks build digital resilience through network design, redundancy, data visibility and governance. The episode covers practical challenges around third-party services, AI-assisted monitoring, and making sure critical systems keep money flowing. Key topics include the balance between automation and human oversight, the importance of shared ownership of data across teams, regulatory pressures (FFIEC, DORA), and the need for accurate documentation and tools like machine data lakes to gain context and control. The main takeaway: protect customer trust by combining the right technologies, operating-model integration and people — focusing on visibility, quick reaction, and sensible investments in security and automation.

September 25, 202617 min

Cisco Optics Podcast Ep66: Confronting the Physics of 400G per Lane - John Calvin, Part 3 of 8

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 66 we continue our conversation with John. We get into the signal-integrity and connector challenges engineers face when pushing Ethernet to 400 gigabits per lane. 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 john.calvin@keysight.com. 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 Cisco Optics-to-Device Compatibility Matrix: https://tmgmatrix.cisco.com/ Cisco Optics-to-Optics Interoperability Matrix: https://tmgmatrix.cisco.com/iop Cisco Optics Product Information: https://copi.cisco.com/ Additional resources Cisco Optics Podcast: https://optics.podcastpage.io/ Blog: https://blogs.cisco.com/tag/ciscoopticsblog Cisco Optics YouTube playlist: http://cs.co/9008BlQen Cisco Optics landing page: cisco.com/go/optics Intro music Music by Sergio Prosvirini from Pixabay Outro music Dreamers by Mixaund | https://mixaund.bandcamp.com Royalty Free Music by https://www.free-stock-music.com