AT&T taps Cisco fixed 5G wireless gateways for WAN service

“Wired remains a highly reliable and fast-performing WAN option for businesses. For most use cases, FWA offers a strong complement to wired WAN, particularly when using SD-WAN, SD-Routing, or routing to take advantage of Cisco traffic orchestration features such as load balancing, traffic shaping, uplink selection, and more,” Desai wrote. “Businesses can extend secure connected experiences everywhere using Cisco Talos-powered cybersecurity capabilities—firewall policies, content filtering, intrusion detection and prevention (IDS and IPS), advanced malware protection (AMP), and more—using both wired WAN and FWA.”

5G FWA is often the best choice for WAN when a business needs to immediately connect a site with minimal downtime, provide connectivity diversity and redundancy, or conduct a large branch deployment, Desai stated. He also noted it’s a good WAN choice for uses cases such as:

• Rural and remote regions where wired WAN can take over nine months to deploy;
• Space-constrained locations where a WAN gateway must be deployed in small, tight spots;
• Pop-up sites where a wired WAN is improbable to deploy; and
• Nonconventional locations such as basements or rooftops too far from wired WAN.

The new MG devices are centrally managed via Meraki’s cloud-based dashboard, which lets customers implement tasks including zero-touch provisioning, role-based security administration, firmware updates, configuration changes and email alerts.