I’ve gotten burned by Cisco in a very similar situation. At this point they basically lean on their largest telecom customers to build their solutions for themz

I’ve gotten burned by Cisco in a very similar situation. At this point they basically lean on their largest telecom customers to build their solutions for themz They moved to this model because the Comcasts / AT&Ts / Verizons around the world started looking at contracting with factories to build their own white-label network gear (when you spend $10 billion+ a year on network gear, this starts making sense). Cisco’s pitch is basically “give us all your requirements and we’ll build whatever you want as long as we have the option to sell it in the market”. Never mind that Cisco is an absolutely terrible partner and the telecoms realized they were getting almost nothing out of the deal, so after a few years the big telecoms all dumped them and went with white label factories in China while working with American companies like Intel and Qualcomm on large component orders to supply the factories. Which left all the small and mid-size telecoms in the lurch for a generational upgrade they were expecting (which is a lot of why Huawei has so much market share in 5G).