Verizon Partners with Lanner, Intel to expand its Virtual Network Services portfolio

Powered by Lanner and Intel, this next-generation Universal Customer Premises Equipment (uCPE) offers flexibility and performance for enterprise and mid-market customers.

In a move to further simplify customer site deployments, Verizon has teamed up with Lanner Electronics, a global enabler in Whitebox Solutions for network communication, security, and NFV/SDN platforms to launch its next-generation enhanced Universal Customer Premises Equipment (uCPE) program.

Verizon’s enhanced uCPE program will run on Lanner’s hardware platform and integrate seamlessly with existing Virtual Network Service (VNS) applications on the Verizon global network.

Powered by Intel’s x86 Atom family processors and designed for small and medium deployments, the modular design of these platforms aggregates LTE and WiFi connectivity to meet “Low Touch” provisioning and future-proof scalability to significantly reduce OPEX while improving business competitiveness for SD WAN deployments.

“Organizations are embracing cloud and mobile first strategies that require more complex networking environments. To address this, we have enhanced our product through tighter integration with the hardware and software ecosystems to ensure we meet and exceed our customers’ expectations,” said Jason Kett, SDN Product Manager at Verizon. “This Whitebox Solution increases operational management efficiency for hardware maintenance and facilitates easier deployment of multiple Virtual Network Function (VNF) vendors on a single open platform.”

Verizon's uCPE eliminates the need for enterprises to invest in separate hardware appliances for critical VNFs such as software-defined WAN (SD WAN), security, routing, WAN optimization, or any other network function that can be virtualized.

The underlying architecture for both the Hosted Network Services and uCPE deployment models that support VNS is built on Open Source standard components, including OpenStack, meaning that the development times for adding new features, services and technology partners can be radically shortened.

Jeans Tseng, VP and GM of the Telecom Application Business Unit at Lanner added, “Our expertise in building converged network platforms in both communications and security enables the close collaboration with Intel, and we together address the uCPE market. For over 3 years we have invested in this market segment as we have seen the challenges and turned them into an opportunity to become an industrial phenomenon for Whitebox Solutions based uCPEs. Working closely with the Verizon team and understanding their challenges allows us to meet their requirements and thus be chosen as a uCPE platform provider.”

Verizon’s VNS portfolio allows customers to simplify their networks by replacing complex webs of multiple purpose-built hardware devices with virtual network functions, through fully tested solution bundles, helping expedite transformation by reducing or removing the labor and high costs of testing and manual configuration.