Will 5G revolutionize SD-WAN? What about secure access service edge (SASE)? VMware certainly thinks so.

In a blog post earlier this week, VMware's Director of Service Provider and Edge Ramkumar Venketaramani and 5G Solutions Architect Ajitesh Gupta provided their rationale for how 5G will not only disrupt traditional MPLS networking, but open the door to new deployment schemes and use cases.

While SD-WAN, which enables dynamic policy-based routing of traffic across multiple heterogeneous underlay networks, presents enterprises with a compelling alternative to rigid MPLS WAN architectures, the two argued that it also leaves communications service providers (CSPs) in a tricky spot.

“SD-WAN doesn’t replace MPLS, but it has largely capped its growth,” they wrote. “5G is poised to change that.”

Cellular WAN is nothing new for VMware. The company’s SD-WAN appliances have long supported 4G LTE connectivity. However, cellular has been used sparingly, often for a limited set of applications and in environments where traditional transport technologies aren’t available or practical.

These include temporary sites and remote point-of-sale terminals where bandwidth demands are usually small.

“Most businesses haven’t considered 4G a viable alternative for a site’s primary network connection,” Venketaramani and Gupta wrote.

5G by comparison is a different animal altogether, promising significantly higher bandwidth and greater control thanks to technologies like network slicing.

Working with service providers and carriers, VMWare aims to orchestrate not only the overlay, but the underlay too, Karl Brown, senior director of product marketing for VMware’s SASE business unit, told SDxCentral during VMworld 2021.

By integrating with carriers' internal systems, VMware customers will soon be able to orchestrate the underlay, using network slicing, to achieve MPLS-like quality of service and reliability over a cellular network, according to Brown.

What’s more, these integrations allow customers to define specific service-level agreements on the fly that take into account bandwidth and quality of service, he added.

VMware also sees 5G as an opportunity to fundamentally change the way SD-WAN topologies are architected and eliminate the need for CPE by taking advantage of the abundant edge-compute resources promised by multi-access edge compute (MEC).

MEC, which shifts compute infrastructure out to the edge of the service provider network, is considered a critical component to make good on 5G’s promise of ultra-low latency communications.

VMware believes, in the near future, many enterprises will have the option to deploy SD-WAN services to a MEC node just outside their premises.

This, the company argues, will vastly simplify deployments and lower the barrier to SD-WAN and SASE adoption.

“This makes deployments simpler for everyone — CSPs, SD-WAN providers, and enterprise customers,” Venketaramani and Gupta wrote.

However, ease of deployment and adoption aren’t the only benefits. SD-WAN platforms built on a cloud-native foundation will also benefit from improved scalability and security thanks to more frequent updates and patches.

“The combination of 5G and SD-WAN creates a positive feedback loop where advances in one fuel growth in the other,” Venketaramani and Gupta concluded.