Opengear announces Verizon certification for ACM7000-L resilience gateway products with global modem

Opengear, provider of solutions that deliver secure, resilient network access and automation to critical IT infrastructure, announced Wednesday that the ACM7000-L Resilience Gateway products have received the Verizon Wireless Open Development Device Certification for embedded global modem.

The ACM7000-L Resilience Gateway ensures uptime at branch offices, retail stores, kiosks and other remote sites. Cellular access provides an always-on gateway to your off-site network devices, even when the primary network is down. It helps identify and remediate issues at the network edge before they become failures with Smart OOB, and provides maximize WAN resilience with Failover to Cellular to 4G LTE networks and built-in multicarrier capabilities.

To earn the Verizon Wireless Open Development Device Certification, the ACM7000-L Resilience Gateway products underwent a series of testing and conformance requirements that all devices must meet before they are certified for use on the Verizon Wireless network. Opengear is the first manufacturer to embed the EM7565 modem in a device and complete Verizon certification.

As organizations become increasingly global and move their networks to the edge, network management becomes progressively more complex. As most hardware devices require the use of a regionalized modem, not only are network engineers responsible for ensuring edge locations receive the right hardware, they must also ensure that hardware is equipped with a modem configured for the local wireless network, or risk the devices being unusable. With the move to a global modem, Opengear has made it possible for customers to purchase and use a single, network agnostic device across all edge locations globally.

By eliminating the need for region-specific modules across its ACM7000-L Resilience Gateway products – including the ACM7004-2-L, ACM7004-5-L and ACM7008-2-L – coupled with its built in Smart OOB and Failover to Cellular capabilities, organizations are able to run global networks on a single device SKU.

Additional feature improvements to the ACM7000-L Resilience Gateway products include CAT12 speed 600 Mbps download / 150 Mbps upload capabilities with 3G failback, providing customers with a single solution for out-of-band (OOB) and WAN failover at remote sites and allowing the download of critical files onto embedded device storage over cellular networks. 

It also offers improved flexibility with high density of serial console access in a small form factor via a combination of 4 x serial RS232 ports, 8 x serial RS232 ports and 4 x serial RS232 with an embedded 4x GbE switch; improved, dual SIM slots for carrier diversity that enable error-free installation with push click; with high device operating and storage temperature, allowing products to be deployed in harsh and uncontrolled environments with no impact on performance.

“As networks are increasingly distributed, organizations are looking for infrastructure that simplifies network management while ensuring resilience,” said Thomas Wang, senior product manager, Opengear. “At Opengear, we strive to provide our customers with this peace of mind by providing class-leading products that can be bought and provisioned once and used everywhere around the world. With the updates to our ACM7000-L Resilience Gateway products – including the Verizon certification – we continue to lead the industry by providing unmatched speed, value and flexibility.”

Uplevel delivers SD-WAN to small business; gives high-quality VoIP, reliable Internet and 75 percent savings

Uplevel Systems now offers software-defined Wide Area Network or "SD-WAN" capabilities optimized for small to medium businesses (SMBs). SD-WAN traditionally involves replacing costly telecom services with cost-effective Internet connections between sites. 

Smaller companies find SD-WAN cost-prohibitive because most offerings include advanced features and other "bells and whistles" they must pay for but do not need. In practice, the prospective cost savings also may be compromised by poorly performing Internet connections or call quality between sites.

The Uplevel solution optimizes SD-WAN for small business in four critical ways, including ensuring call quality for voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Phone systems are still the lifeblood of many small businesses and voice call quality is highly sensitive to delays of mere tenths of a second. 

Uplevel's integrated managed service platform includes built-in VoIP quality of service (QoS) mechanisms that ensure voice calls always receive priority over data and other "best effort" transactions and also eliminate packet loss that can lead to poor call quality. 

Uplevel delivers a targeted and reliable small business SD-WAN solution that removes both cost and complexity to deliver the features and benefits SMBs need. Uplevel eliminates traditional upfront costs of approximately $1,000 per site and reduces ongoing costs by 75 percent or more versus traditional solutions. 

Along with adding failover and load balancing optimizing quality and reliability, the Uplevel solution reduces upfront equipment costs by up to $3,000 per site. Users can log in safely using secure virtual private network (VPN) services and cloud-based management allows MSPs to manage multiple sites in real time from anywhere on the device of their choice. 

The Uplevel solution enables two SD-WAN mechanisms for improving and maintaining reliability: "Failover" whereby companies purchase a second Internet connection to provide backup, and "load balancing" in which two primary Internet connections remain in use at all times with traffic distributed to achieve the desired bandwidth at the lowest possible cost.