Connectivity is the core of a wide-area network, bringing an organization’s services, applications, and data to life
What happens when primary or secondary wired connections fail? Organizations that move beyond wires to a Wireless WAN (WWAN) — connecting fixed and temporary locations, vehicles, and IoT devices through cellular broadband — don’t have to worry about finding out.
A wide-area network, or WAN, is a telecommunications network that connects various local area networks (LANs) to each other as well as to headquarters, cloud servers, and elsewhere. Enterprise WANs allow users to share access to applications, services, and other centrally located resources.
Traditionally, WANs usually have consisted of wired lines connecting fixed locations. However, enterprises are continuously cutting cables, making WWAN a networking staple.
What is Wireless WAN?
Simply put, a Wireless WAN deploys cellular broadband — including 4G, Gigabit-Class LTE, and 5G technology — as an essential part of WAN infrastructure to connect stores, offices, vehicles, IoT devices, and more at the network’s edge.
Establishing and maintaining a Wireless WAN requires at least one active SIM card in a wireless router or adapter, a data plan, cellular network availability, and a cloud-based management system to monitor and troubleshoot devices connected to the network.
WAN connection types supplementing cellular links can vary, with the most common being wired broadband, fiber, MPLS, or additional cellular links. However, low-orbit satellite connections are also gaining traction as a wireless connectivity option. While remote businesses contemplate the value of Starlink vs. 5G, it’s better to see the two as complementary components to a more robust Wireless WAN solution.
The benefits of adding cellular connectivity to your WAN
Wireless WAN solutions solve multiple problems for business networks, create new opportunities, and lay the foundation for further transformation and innovation. Incorporating cellular WAN connection types into an enterprise network offers some key advantages:
Highly reliable
Wireless broadband is an over-the-air connection that’s protected from terrestrial challenges, such as a backhoe accidentally cutting a fiber line.
Flexible
5G and LTE can be deployed immediately, instead of waiting weeks or even months for a vendor to install a wired line. Wireless is also easy to relocate to another room, site, vehicle, or spot.
Scalable
Cellular networks are designed to support millions of endpoints across a nationwide footprint. Setting up a link at a new branch office or in-vehicle takes a matter of hours instead of weeks. Also, the ability to deal with just one or two nationwide cellular operators, instead of many regionally-based wired ISPs, increases predictability and simplifies administration.
Cost-effective
Often organizations spend less time on network management and troubleshooting. With the ability to manage wireless networks remotely, the cost of deploying staff or third-party vendors for on-site repairs also decreases.
Strategies for Wireless WAN deployments
When looking at what WWAN is used for, there are multiple strategies to explore. The good news is? Businesses that deploy a Wireless WAN solution can reap the benefits of each one.
Enhanced network failover
For many enterprise businesses, the ability to bolster network failover solutions is reason enough to incorporate 5G or LTE into their WAN architecture. That’s because network downtime can eat through revenue, costing most companies multiple thousands of dollars for each minute a network is offline. With cellular in place as a primary or secondary WAN connection type, businesses can achieve 99.99% uptime.
If a wired connection does go down, wireless links can connect directly to remote devices through the console port of a cellular router. Known as Out-of-Band Management, this allows IT teams to diagnose and fix problems over the air.
Connecting beyond wired reach
There are many scenarios in business where wires simply aren’t a viable option for connectivity. From pop-up sites or self-service kiosks in remote areas to digital signs on a long stretch of freeway, the cost and time of getting wires to these locations is prohibitive and unrealistic — especially in the case of vehicle connectivity where wireless connectivity is the exclusive option.
In these instances, 5G and LTE WAN connection types improve business mobility and reach, effectively extending the edges of the organization. These edges can then extend to incorporate vast IoT networks to improve operational efficiencies through the use of sensors, meters, video surveillance, and more.
Augmenting bandwidth
Augmenting a wired link with one or more cellular links is a way to increase available bandwidth on the network. Traffic can be distributed across concurrent WAN connections using load balancing or links can be combined in a process known as link bonding to create a “fatter pipe” for data to flow through.
SD-WAN solutions combined with Wireless WAN architecture also provide ways to separate traffic based on pre-defined policies to improve overall flow or prioritization.