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

Cisco Meraki rolled out 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) gateways, and AT&T said it will use them to offer a new service for business branch offices.

The new Meraki MG cellular MG52 and MG52E gateways fill out the high-end of Meraki’s cellular gateway family, which includes four other models, and offer 2 Gbps/300Mbp throughput – which is twice the throughput of current high-end MG offerings. In addition, the MG52 and MG 52E include two 2.5Gbe ports, according to Cisco. 

Cellular gateways transpose a cellular signal into wired WAN Ethernet connectivity, enabling high-speed, always-on cellular network connectivity for business-critical operations, wrote Pratik S. Desai, product marketing lead for 5G fixed wireless access and WAN application assurance for SD-WANs at Cisco, in a blog about the new devices.

“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.

It’s through this dashboard that customers can plug in new devices and provision AT&T’s 5G wireless WAN service. “Customers can now immediately connect full-stack, secure Cisco SD-Branch and SD-Campus networks with 5G FWA at all their branches—up to thousands at once,” according to AT&T.

AT&T lets customers prepurchase FWA data plans directly from the Meraki dashboard to use cloud-managed eSIM on the MG52 and MG52E.

Other service providers will also offer the MG52 and MG 52E as part of their service packages. For example, T-Mobile offers them through its managed Connected Workplace offering and Verizon Business will offer the Cisco gear through its 5G FWA service.