A10 Networks announced it secured five major 5G network design wins in the second half of 2018 for its A10 Thunder Convergent Firewall (CFW) Gi/SGi firewall solution, including three wins in the fourth quarter.
A10 Networks was selected by these carriers in Asia and EMEA because of the Thunder CFW’s unmatched ability to meet the massive capacity demands of 4G and 5G networks with unprecedented performance and scale, comprehensive feature set, and rich automation capabilities. Capacity demands rise significantly in 5G networks due to substantial increases in concurrent sessions, extreme reliability and higher connections per second. As a result, legacy firewalls often cannot handle the traffic. A10 Thunder CFW outperforms all competitors in these areas.
“A10 is extremely well positioned to address the security needs of mobile carriers and their 4G and 5G networks,” said A10’s CEO Lee Chen. “We secured five major 5G design wins in recent months and are working closely with numerous other leading operators around the world on their 5G security upgrades and transformation projects.”
“5G networks introduce major new requirements for scalability and performance, lower latency, complex virtual multi-vendor integrations, and automation,” Chen added. “This complexity plays directly to A10’s strengths as an industry and technology leader in hyper scalability, feature richness, Gi-LAN consolidation, and AI-driven automation.”
The five mobile operators are deploying A10’s 5G Gi-LAN solution in a variety of form factors, including high-performance appliances, virtualized solutions, and bare metal servers. A10 is also in conversations with mobile carriers to run the A10 CFW in containerized environments in some locations.
A10’s recent 5G security design wins include two previously announced deals in the third quarter of 2018. In addition, A10 secured three wins in the fourth quarter. All five operators are planning to launch their first commercial 5G services in the first quarter of 2019.
Highlights of the Enhanced A10 Thunder CFW 5G-GiLAN Solution
- Gi-LAN Consolidation — A10 5G-GiLAN solution consolidates L4–L7 functions including CGNAT, stateful firewall and application visibility for streamlined management, less operational overhead and reduced latency to integrate greater efficiencies on the Gi-LAN.
- Application Visibility & Control — DPI-based application visibility with comprehensive subscriber awareness provides granular insights into network traffic. Understanding network and application traffic trends allows for effective planning, deeper business intelligence, enhanced Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) compliance and service monetization.
- GTP Firewall – A10’s solution defends the mobile core against GTP-based attacks coming in from access networks and roaming partners to support uninterrupted operations. It supports integrated mobile network security features for GTP control plane, including protocol conformance, rate-limiting, scanning for malformed GTP packets.
- Intelligent Traffic Steering – A10’s subscriber-aware traffic steering solution enables service providers to enhance their business models for new revenue streams with differentiated service offerings, and can improve cost efficiencies with better utilization of value added services (VAS) resources.
- Accelerates adoption of SDN/NFV – A10’s 5G-Gi-LAN solution right-sizes networks with on-demand capacity, and leverages consumption flexibility with a software subscription-based capacity pooling licensing model to reduce overprovisioning. The Thunder CFW achieves the scalability and performance needed across software and SDN environments to support emerging data centre and cloud architectures.
