If social distancing has taught us anything, it’s how essential even virtual face-to-face interaction is—which might offer the best use case yet for the well-hyped 5G cellular network standard. Here’s why two of its champions—Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf—are so optimistic about the new era of teleconferencing, telemedicine, and more. INTERVIEW BY CLIFTON LEAF

THIS EDITED Q&A HAS BEEN CONDENSED FOR SPACE AND CLARITY.

Welcome to you both. Let’s start with you, Chuck. You’ve said that 95% of your 77,000-strong global workforce is now telecommuting. What have you learned by watching so much of your team work remotely?

ROBBINS: That many have figured out they can be productive in this environment in ways they didn’t understand before. It’s been strange, but this crisis hasn’t been a technological stretch for us because we built this technology; it’s pretty native to us. I think that we’re going to be much more comfortable having meetings by teleconference. So [post-COVID] we’ll have people who will work from home, those who’ll work in the office, and people who’ll do a little bit of both. And I think it’s going to change how we think about our interactions with customers and partners and employees going forward.

MOLLENKOPF: We currently have about 7% of our workforce in the office on any given day. And we won’t grow that too much, too quickly—in part because we don’t have to. The productivity’s been incredible.

Because of the way in which we do things, we had to put the infrastructure in place to share work across sites internationally, and that same infrastructure was helpful to share work within a city like San Diego [where Qualcomm is headquartered]. People can work pretty much wherever they can have connectivity.

Chuck, Cisco had one of the earliest platforms for that with Webex. And yet people now use a different teleconferencing name as a verb— they talk about “Zooming.” Why aren’t we talking about “Webexing”?

ROBBINS: We’re running at about three times the capacity that we were in February. And we were already the biggest in the world then. So the numbers have been astonishing, and it’s not slowing down. You know, a lot of people had about nine days to transition to doing business online, and they did it with whatever they could find: duct tape, superglue, Zoom, whatever they had. Now they’re stepping back and trying to determine what the architecture is. And Webex was built for secure, remote productivity.

Steve, just as it did with teleconferencing, COVID-19 has made the use case for 5G—with its enhanced security and greater capacity for data—that much more apparent.

MOLLENKOPF: Obviously, it’s a tragic situation, as we all know, a tremendous human toll. But I never have to answer the question anymore: Why do we need 5G? Because now everybody sees it. How do governments prepare for the next pandemic? Well, they need to invest in telemedicine and remote education, and secure capabilities for connecting people and enterprises. There’s going to be a tremendous amount of investment in digital infrastructure to make that happen. For us—and I think for a lot of companies in this space—the confidence to invest into that wave remains, which is why we’re still hiring people and we’re very confident that there’s an opportunity on the other side of this pandemic.

ROBBINS: If you step back and think about the innovation that happened after the 4G transition, it was pretty astonishing. And it’s going to be fascinating to see what people think up when there’s that much bandwidth with 5G virtually anywhere. As to Steve’s point earlier around education, particularly the K–12 system, the other thing this pandemic has reminded us of is the inequality that exists. We need to have technologies that will allow us to easily deliver high bandwidth into rural areas, into low-income areas—where people are driving to parking lots or libraries to get on Wi-Fi because they don’t have Internet access. As an industry and as a society, we have to focus on how this technology continues to increase inclusiveness.

Regarding this division of digital haves and have-nots, nearly all of the major 5G phones announced this year are priced over $1,000. How many consumers in a country with 30 million newly unemployed people can afford a 5G phone?

MOLLENKOPF: We’re still in the early days of 5G rolling out. And if you were to compare how quickly the penetration of 5G is moving down in the price tiers, it’s actually happening faster than it did with 4G. It’s happening fastest in China, where there’s tremendous penetration of 5G. The net result is that it builds scale quicker, and that’s what brings prices down.

There is no common playbook for this, but you both went through the financial crisis and the dotcom bubble bursting. After the financial crisis, Cisco had some cash on hand and was able to scoop up a number of companies. And Chuck, you have a pretty healthy balance sheet now. (I could see a bit of a smile peek out when I said that.) Are you on the lookout for strategic buys?

ROBBINS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean we have paused at looking at acquisitions—but we’re also not changing our strategy. There may be targets that are more attractive because of valuations, but those targets might not be interested in selling at devaluation. I’m not one to do a deal that isn’t mutually positive for the acquiree and for us. So it’s not like the current economic situation creates a new list of targets that weren’t there before.

Let me ask you the same, Steve: You came close not long ago to doing a very big deal, hoping to buy [the Dutch-American company] NXP Semiconductors. That didn’t work out. Are you still looking to expand?

MOLLENKOPF: The short answer is yes. We’ve just come off, over the last several years, a pretty big capital return program. And right now we’re in the process of really getting the balance sheet in a position where we can take advantage of some strategic opportunities we see. One little lesson that we learned in 2008 during the financial crisis, quite frankly, was that the investments we made in that dip were the things that carried us through the next decade. There were things that we’d done in smartphone technologies, LTE, others, that really propelled the company afterward. We actually got a relative advantage over companies that didn’t do that. While I’m not going to point to a particular target now, here’s one thing I think you can think of: The architecture of the cloud—and the evolution of the enterprise itself—is moving toward the “edge.” And it’s going to create a tremendous amount of economic value. We did a recent study that predicts this transition [enabled by 5G] will create something on the order of $13 trillion worth of economic value in 2035.

Steve, you played lacrosse in college; Chuck, you played basketball. Now you’re both in the wrestling world—which is to say, the technology sector. But suddenly everybody seems like they’re just holding hands these days. What’s happening to the tech world?

ROBBINS: We’re all just becoming softer and gentler! Look, I think on issues of philanthropy or in times of crisis we’ve always risen above the competitive nature. We have efforts in Silicon Valley that we’ve been working on for two and a half years, meeting quarterly and focusing on areas like hunger, homelessness, and education. This crisis is no different. I mean this is much bigger than any one of us or any company. And the human toll is much more important than any petty competitiveness. We’ll have to see how short our memories are. But it would be great to think that we could reintroduce more compassion back into our society.

MOLLENKOPF: People understand that we have a broader responsibility in society. But I can assure you, it’s still very much a gladiator business. You win one product to give you the right to play to the next product and you have to win them all in order to stay around.

Steve, what’s it like to be at peace? You know you don’t have an activist investor circling around; you’re no longer in a massive fight with Apple. It must be an odd feeling.

MOLLENKOPF: You know, that’s a very insightful question. This is a competitive industry. We just look like we’re genteel. And you actually have to like that part of it, meaning you can thrive in that part of it— when you’re amped up all the time. When you’re kind of in peacetime, you miss it a little bit. But I’m very happy to be in that position. I much prefer peacetime in terms of how the rest of the organization reacts to it— even if I miss the fight a bit.

Between the lines

(1) “Please mute your lines”: Cisco acquired Webex in 2007 for $3.2 billion from its founders, Subrah Iyar and Min Zhu. (Iyar, notably, was an early investor in Zoom—as was Qualcomm Ventures.)

(2) Meeting creep: Webex hosted more than 20 billion meeting minutes in April, up from 14 billion in March—which, in turn, was double the number in February.

(3) Global investment in 5G wireless networks

2018：612 M. 2021: 6.8 B. (projected) Source: Gartner

(4) 5G devices as a share of smartphone shipments: 8.9% in 2020 (projected); 28.1% in 2023 (projected) (Source: IDC).

(5) Pocket change: At the end of January, Cisco had $10 billion in net cash (cash minus debt). In 2019 the company also posted the highest annual profits in its history.

(6) Behind the buzzword: Edge computing involves migrating power from a data processing center in the cloud to, say, your mobile phone (or other connected device)—where the information is actually being produced or consumed.

(7) Hoop dreams: Robbins, who played JV basketball for the UNC Tar Heels, once scrimmaged against Michael Jordan.

(8) Peace—or at least a cease-fire: In April 2019, Qualcomm and Apple settled their patent dispute, agreeing to a six-year licensing agreement, among other things. Qualcomm remains in litigation with the Federal Trade Commission, which has accused the company of using anticompetitive tactics. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit granted a partial stay; Qualcomm is awaiting the outcome of its appeal.

“We don’t worry about liquidity. We just make our strategy clear: Focus on our employees, our customers, and our communities, period.”

—CHUCK ROBBINS

“This COVID situation is very, very tough for us all to deal with collectively, but it’s probably not the worst thing that we’ve had to deal with as a company in the last two years in terms of existential threat or anything. We just have to get through it.”

—STEVE MOLLENKOPF