It wants to go further down market, to individual consumers. It plans to sell its new fixed wireless service to consumers by year end 2000. And it hopes to dominate the market for home networking, which will be a multi-billion dollar space some day. It will get there by licensing its technology to consumer electronics companies such as Sony. And by investing in home-networking startups.
Cisco wants to own the telphone market.
But Nortel and Lucent have been selling to phone companies for much longer. They have more salespeople, more relationships, more reliability. Pressure on original business. As Cisco moves into future markets, upstart companies are eating away at its original business. Juniper Networks, for instance, sells a superior router.