Page 39 - SAMENA Trends - June-July 2020

REGIONAL & MEMBERS UPDATES SAMENA TRENDS

AT&T Launches 5G in 28 New Markets; Network Goes Live in Puerto Rico

AT&T Communications has announced Salt Lake City. In addition, AT&T has former 3G spectrum in the 850MHz band.
that it has switched on its 5G network in confirmed that 5G services have now TeleGeography notes that AT&T’s original
28 new markets, increasing its footprint gone live in Puerto Rico. The seven millimeter wave (mmWave) 5G footprint
to 355 markets and covering 179 million markets initially covered are Aguadilla, remains unchanged, covering parts of 35
people nationwide. Notable locations Aibonito Municipality, Arecibo, Mayaguez, cities. This network – branded ‘5G+’ – was
covered from this week include: Orlando, Ponce, Rincon Municipality and San launched in December 2018 using 39GHz
Miami, Maui County, Dallas, Austin and Juan. The low band 5G network utilizes frequencies.

AT&T Broadens its SD-WAN Reach with Cisco for Better Security Across
Banches and Cloud

With workforces becoming more distributed due to the COVID-19 for cloud networking and security, but also in the context of a
pandemic, AT&T is serving up more security and better cloud branch office becoming more of a home office. "It also includes
support with a new SD-WAN service based on Cisco Secure SD- bringing some of the capabilities for security purposes in the
WAN technology. The new SD-WAN solution, which is based on context of SASE applications and cloud applications." During
Cisco's Viptela technology, offers Cisco's security capabilities last month's virtual Cisco Live event, Cisco announced it had
across branches, cloud connections and data centers. AT&T's integrated the secure access service edge (SASE) model across
Rupesh Chokshi, assistant vice president, edge solutions its latest SD-WAN software release and other parts of its portfolio.
product marketing management, said the new flavor of SD-WAN Last year Gartner analysts coined the SASE term and positioned
covers the full market spectrum for enterprises, mid-market it as the unification of enterprise access security initiatives and
organizations and small-to-medium businesses. "We are seeing WAN networking platforms, including SD-WAN. With the 17.2
a lot of growth in the market place with SD-WAN, both in terms of software release, Cisco blended its Cisco Umbrella Cloud Security
pre-pandemic and post-pandemic." Chokshi said in an interview portfolio, which includes Cisco's secure internet gateway, with its
with FierceTelecom. "Some of the use cases have changed post- Viptela-based SD-WAN offering. Among other SD-WAN vendors,
pandemic in terms of how the workforce has been distributed to AT&T has deployed VMware's VeloCloud SD-WAN solution. Like
working from home and how organizations are looking at their Cisco, VMware recently made a point of touting its integration
operating environments going forward. "We do see the ongoing of SASE across its portfolio, including SD-WAN. Chokshi said
trends in terms of more and more network optimization, network AT&T's new managed SD-WAN servcie can deliver some of the
modernization, and intelligent networking to deliver to the same capabilities to branches and small home offices, and that
customer business outcomes. We're very excited to deepen our AT&T and Cisco were working to further expand the solution for
relationships with Cisco. We're able to bring very robust underlay/ distributed workforces. Chokshi said some of the verticals that
overlay capabilities, as well as a managed SD-WAN solution, for have expressed interest in the new managed SD-WAN service
our customers globally." AT&T's new SD-WAN offering, which include retail, healthcare and financial services.
has been deployed by some of its customers, includes a reset
of sorts to the hardware and software devices from Cisco. The
hardware devices include Cisco's ISR and ASR routers as well
as Cisco's ENCS white boxes. About a year ago, AT&T expanded
its Edge Solutions portfolio with Cisco's 5000 Series Enterprise
Network Compute System (ENCS) in order to offer its business
customers more virtualized network functions (VNF) choices.
The new SD-WAN offering includes Cisco's IOS XE operating
system, integrated security features through Cisco's Umbrella,
and application-aware firewall protection. It also has a single-
cloud-based dashboard, intrusion prevention, URL filtering, and
malware protection. AT&T Managed Services is working with AT&T
Cybersecurity to support and manage the new SD-WAN service
by using Cisco's vManage controller for a single management
interface for both the network and security. "We have integrated
elements of Wi-Fi, 5G readiness, backhaul and other elements,"
said Cisco's JL Valente, vice president of product management,
managed services, intent-based networking group. "That's really
part of the evolution of offerings that we actually bring to market
with AT&T. So leveraging all the capabilities that we have today

39 JUNE-JULY 2020