With all the discussion about the positive impacts 5G can have on internet access for individuals and businesses, it’s vital that network engineers keep in mind that 5G’s not the only cellular option for enterprise WANs—4G already delivers many of those benefits.

Nemertes did research with organizations that have made significant commitments to 4G-based wireless in their WANs and identified four common use cases across the organizations. Each of those uses will be improved in several ways with the coming broad availability of 5G. Let’s take a look.

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Wireless WAN has begun to rise in availability and utility, and to improve in affordability. It brings wide-area connectivity to just about any physical space and can hit speeds far in excess of older single or multiple T1 links and DSL.

It has its challenges to be sure, and the biggest ones are centered on the business model. It is hard to get a WWAN connection priced the same way a wired connection is: paying for a given speed, with no arbitrary limit on how many bits can be transferred in a billing period.

So IT teams using WWAN are typically faced with two unpleasant options: a) either pay a flat rate but, when a threshold number of bytes is hit, face a sharp decrease in speed; or b) pay a per-gigabyte overage fee for usage past the threshold. Sometimes carriers want to push both options—decreased speed and pay-by-the-drink overage costs.

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The WAN as initially conceived was about one simple job: the WAN was the network that “connects my sites to each other.” That is, the network connecting users in corporate sites to corporate IT resources in other corporate sites or perhaps colocation facilities. It was all inside-to-inside traffic.

Over the past decade so much has changed that, just before COVID-19 work-from-home mandates took hold, only about 37% of a typical WAN’s traffic was still inside-to-inside, according to Nemertes’ “Next Generation Networks Research Study 2020-2021”. The rest touched the outside world, either originating there—as with remote work against data-center systems—or terminating there—as with SaaS use from a company site—or both as with VPNing into the network only to head back out to a SaaS app.

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Zero Trust relies on continuously re-authorizing users, applications, and devices to establish myriad “perimeters of one” in the environment, but the name isn’t quite accurate.

Zero Trust doesn’t literally mean zero trust; it means zero implicit trust. You—whether that means a person, or a software or hardware system—are not to be trusted simply by virtue of where you are on the network; there is no network perimeter within which you are automatically trusted to connect to services. And you are not to be trusted now just because you were trusted when you first gained access to the network; gaining admission once is not the same thing as ongoing trust. And you are not to be trusted to make the new service connection you are trying to make now just because you were trusted to make the previous one.

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