BARCELONA, Spain – Cisco continues to infiltrate T-Mobile US’ network operations, with the latest advance coming from plans to offer Cisco Meraki-powered 5G cellular gateways certified to work with T-Mobile US’ rapidly expanding fixed-wireless access (FWA) service.

The devices include the Meraki MG51 and MG51E, with the main difference being the “E” having protruding antennas. The devices act as receivers for a 5G FWA signal coming into an enterprise that can then be tied into an internal SD-WAN and managed through the Meraki single-pane platform.

The Cisco devices can support network speeds up to 2 Gb/s on the downlink and up to 300 Mb/s on the uplink.

Jonathan Davidson, EVP and GM for Cisco’s Networking team, explained during a press briefing at the MWC Barcelona 2023 event that the device and platform provide enterprises with a cellular connectivity option. The Meraki integration also allows for the use of the Meraki Auto VPN, firewall, traffic shaping, threat protection, content filtering, and WPA2-Enterpriese security protocols.

“Think of it as where you will have a routing device that will be running SD-WAN and it will have an Ethernet port going down to the WAN. This will be an extension to that where it's a separate gateway that will be managed as one to be able to give you that 5G connectivity,” Davidson said.

Davidson did note that the product shared common policy management with Cisco’s expanding Private 5G platform, but that was the extent of that commonality.

The Cisco devices are somewhat similar to what Cradlepoint launched late last year with T-Mobile US, though with at least a marketing angle tied to the carrier’s FWA push. It also further bolsters T-Mobile US’ enterprise push.

T-Mobile US recently noted it added two million FWA customers last year, pushing its total FWA customer base to 2.6 million customers. CEO Mike Sievert said that growth was more than rivals AT&T, Verizon, and cable operators Comcast and Charter managed to add combined over the same time period.

Sievert said the carrier’s approach to FWA is solely focused on expanding the reach and capacity of its 5G mobile network, which differs from its rivals’ approaches. Those other approaches include an ongoing focus on expanding fiber-based broadband access in the case of AT&T and Verizon, and the cable providers staying focused on growing their cable-based broadband business.

“We’re on a mission to become the best in the world at wireless, and we’re pursuing that mission ambitiously, and so far, very successfully,” Sievert said. “That is the place where the future lies and where we want to be.”

Cisco’s latest deal with T-Mobile US also comes on the heels of the carrier late last year unveiling the commercial launch of its Cisco-powered cloud-native 5G core gateway platform. That platform is based on Cisco’s cloud-native control plane that uses Kubernetes to orchestrate containers running on bare metal and allows the carrier to run nearly all of its voice and data traffic on this cloud-native 5G standalone (SA) core, including its recently expanded 5G voice-over new radio (VoNR) service.

Davidson explained this deployment furthered Cisco’s software approach toward delivering and supporting new telecom services.

“What we learned through this and the biggest takeaway was how rapidly and how well we can integrate our software development pipeline to their deployment,” Davidson said. “In the traditional appliance world, humans typically do one or two software deployments a year. In this new world of containerization, we can enable new software to be deployed every week to a global set of customers. So that requires a significant amount of change on our part to be able to have quality software delivery every week, but also on the part of the carrier, it takes changes to be able to absorb the ability to go and roll all that software out without anyone noticing, every week. That's a pretty big transition, but that enables a pretty dramatic set of efficiency and speed. That's more the cloud, cloud scale, and cloud pace than we had just a few years ago.”

T-Mobile US previously noted the platform will also allow it to more quickly test and deploy new services at scale. It cited specific 5G and IoT services, including its FWA internet service, network slicing, and VoNR.