Lanner Electronics and 128 Technology have partnered on a white box universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) for software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and virtual network function (VNF) deployments.

The product combines Lanner’s uCPE appliances and 128 Technology’s routing software. It’s “transport agnostic” in that it combines MPLS and VPN tunnels, 4G LTE, WiFi failover, and legacy ATM T1 services into a single uCPE platform.

The platform is based on 128 Technology’s Secure Vector Routing, a session-oriented networking router that aims to simplify the way routers work. The software routes traffic across public and private networks, and then metadata communicates how to route packets from one private network to another. This eliminates the need for a tunnel or other technologies such as firewalls, load balancers, and analytics tools.

Although 128 Technology doesn’t like to be referred to as an SD-WAN company, its software does serve a similar purpose — it connects branch offices and offloads some traffic to data centers.

The new platform combats latency issues prevalent in many SD-WAN deployments, according to the partners.

Lanner’s white-box uCPE appliances are specifically designed for VNFs edge deployments. They provide low latency, high availability, crypto acceleration, WiFi and LTE connectivity and failover, as well as high core counts for network virtualization.

Last year, Lanner partnered with other white box hardware vendors in an effort led by SD-WAN provider Versa Networks to promote an open hardware ecosystem for SD-WAN customers. Proponents of this approach say white box hardware is more cost effective than proprietary hardware, and can be more quickly and easily deployed.

In another example of the move toward white box hardware for SD-WAN, late last month Huawei rolled out uCPE appliances for its SD-WAN.