Silver Peak Expands 4G LTE SD-WAN Business Opportunities at MWC 2018

By  Nav Chander, Senior Director of Service Provider Marketing, Silver Peak

As more than 100,000 attendees from around the world descend on Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona this week, there will be many new and exciting communications technologies on display, ranging from IoT to 5G to augmented reality to artificial intelligence, machine learning and SD-WAN at this global event.

MWC also provides an opportunity to showcase how service providers are expanding their existing services footprint with tiered managed SD-WAN services. By leveraging their 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution)  infrastructures, service providers are now offering new mobility-based 4G LTE managed SD-WAN services. In fact, Silver Peak and TPx Communications announced a new strategic agreement at MWC this week that underscores how TPx plans to expand their managed SD-WAN services into global markets with 4G LTE as one of the key underlying transport network choices for their global customers.

In 2018, a number of global mobile carriers plan to offer new SD-WAN solutions to help expand their enterprise services offering with 4G LTE services. These new use cases will offer an opportunity to connect remote locations, where there may be no fixed connections available, and retail sites where LTE provides an excellent alternative where fixed line services are not available in active-active mode, or as a backup to a broadband or MPLS solution.

MWC 2018 also marks an important event for Silver Peak. At the event, we will showcase a live EdgeConnect SD-WAN 4G LTE solution that demonstrates how high-quality voice and data applications can continue to work, even in a congested LTE network environment like MWC.  Our partnership with 4G LTE specialist BEC Technologies enables enterprises to easily incorporate BEC’s MX-200 LTE CPE into their EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution deployments.

The Silver Peak EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution can bring new levels of performance and availability to mobile-based business use cases that utilize 4G LTE as a primary WAN connection as well as part of an active component of an aggregated multi-service WAN edge. EdgeConnect’s capabilities such as path conditioning, WAN optimization and business intent overlays combine to ensure that application performance is not compromised in a 4G LTE environment.

The EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution continuously monitors the underlying 4G services for packet loss, latency and jitter. In the event that one of the 4G services experiences excessive loss, latency or jitter or even drops its connection, EdgeConnect initiates sub-second failover to the alternate path, ensuring voice, video and data connections continue without interruption over the remaining 4G service.

Silver Peak’s  innovative dynamic path control and path conditioning capabilities enhance 4G LTE networks to enable managed service providers to extend their tiered managed high-performance SD-WAN service offers to remote and temporary locations where there is limited or no fixed network coverage.  It is also opening up additional opportunities for mobile carriers to leverage their 4G LTE infrastructure to offer business-grade SD-WAN services.