The News: At Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona Cisco and T-Mobile announced plans to offer Cisco Meraki’s first-ever 5G cellular gateways for fixed wireless access (FWA), the MG51 and MG51E to businesses. The Cisco Meraki MG51 and MG51E cellular gateways introduce a new, 5G-powered, cloud-first way of doing wide area networking (WAN). Read more from T-Mobile.
T-Mobile to Offer Cisco Meraki 5G Gateways for a Simpler and Scalable Business Internet
Analyst Take: T-Mobile’s move to offer Cisco Meraki 5G cellular gateways is big news for businesses who have had to deal with lengthy and uncertain installation timelines, gated and restrictive bandwidth plans, and inconsistent nationwide availability due to a wired network.
The Cisco Meraki 5G Gateways solution solves those issues by providing simplified, scalable, and reliable network managed services powered by T-Mobile’s 5G network and the cloud-first Cisco Meraki 5G platform, a first-of-its-kind cloud native 5G core gateway. T-Mobile has moved all of its 5G and 4G traffic to the new cloud native converged core providing customers with a more than 10% improvement in network speeds and lower latency. T-Mobile can quickly and easily test and deliver new 5G and IoT services to its customers with the new Cisco Meraki 5G core gateway.
The T-Mobile managed services will offer a range of advanced capabilities based on the Cisco Meraki 5G platform, including:
- Same-day connectivity: Customers can quickly connect branches, with true zero-touch provisioning with no trained on-site support needed. This means IT staff can focus on other critical business needs.
- Resilient WAN: Always-on, Cisco Meraki cloud-managed 5G FWA running on T-Mobile’s network offers reliable WAN services for business-critical operations, alongside improved experiences for customers and employees.
- Robust performance: Up to 2 Gbps down / 300 Mbps up.
- Lower latency: Enabling a variety of new use cases at the network’s edge with lower latency than 4G.
- Security and performance: Leading network security and SD-Branch capabilities on the Cisco Meraki platform including Cisco Meraki Auto VPN, firewall, traffic shaping, threat protection, content filtering, and native security protocols such as WPA2-Enterprise.
With the Cisco Meraki 5G platform, T-Mobile will be able to provide businesses with simpler network functions across cloud, edge, and data centers, therefore significantly reducing their operational life cycle management with a fully automated converged gateway. This increased efficiency gives them the immediate benefit of faster speeds, lower latency, and advanced capabilities like edge computing.
Bottom line, T-Mobile 5G combined with Cisco’s Meraki 5G platform offers a fast, simple way to scale secure, reliable 5G business internet – anywhere, anytime, across all industries, easing the process of digital transformation and providing solutions that facilitate growth, spur efficiencies, and help control or even reduce costs.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
Other insights from Futurum Research:
T-Mobile and Cisco Show Why a Distributed Nationwide Cloud Native 5G Core Gateway is Sexy
The Six Five In The Booth with Cisco at Mobile World Congress 2023
T-Mobile and Amazon Web Services Work Together to Provide 5G Advanced Network Solutions
Author Information
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
