The Cato Socket Gets LTE: The Answer for Instant Sites and Instant Backup

Every year, Bonnaroo, the popular music and arts festival, takes over a 700-acre farm in the southern U.S. for four days. While the festival is known for its diverse lineup of music, it also offers a unique and immersive festival experience filled with art, comedy, cinema, and more.

For the networking nerds among us, though, the festival might be even more attractive as a stress test of sorts. The festival is held in a temporary, rural location. There is no fixed internet connection to support the numerous vendors. And there’s no city WiFi to plug into. Still, that cute little booth selling the event’s hottest T-shirts needs to process customer transactions, manage inventory through the home office, and access cloud-based sales tools—all while ensuring data security and complying with industry regulations.

In short, the perfect problem for our newest Cato Socket – the X1600-LTE Socket. The Cato Socket has always worked with external LTE modems, but by integrating LTE into the Socket, there’s one less device to deploy and one less console to master. The LTE connection is fully managed within Cato, providing usage monitoring of the data plan and real time monitoring of the LTE link quality all within the same Cato Management Application as the rest of your infrastructure.

The new Cato X1600-LTE Socket includes two antennas and can operate at up to 150 Mbps upstream and 600 Mbps downstream.

LTE As the Secondary Access Link

Pop-up music and cultural festivals are hardly the only industries that will benefit from relying on the Cato X1600-LTE Socket. LTE is in high demand as a secondary link, particularly for geographically dispersed enterprises and enterprises relying on real-time data and communications.

Retail chains, for example, often have locations in areas of weak infrastructure but still require uninterrupted connectivity for critical operations like point-of-sale systems, inventory management, and secure communication. Logistics and transportation companies back in the headquarters need secondary access to ensure real-time communications with their trucks and fleet.

Cato SASE Cloud is particularly effective in carrying real-time communications. Our packet loss mitigation techniques, QoS, the zero or near zero packet loss on our backbone all make for a superior real-time experience. So, it’s no surprise that enterprises relying on real-time data and communication would be interested in the Cato X1600-LTE Socket.

Healthcare providers are looking at it for essential real-time data access for patient care, remote consultations, and medical device communication. Financial institutions require consistent connectivity to conduct secure transactions, data transfers, and communication. Cato X1600-LTE Socket provides a backup connection for a safety net during primary network downtime, minimizing financial losses and reputational damage.

LTE As the Primary Access Link

Like booths at Lollapalooza, many enterprises can use LTE as a primary connection to Cato SASE Cloud where there’s no DIA infrastructure available. Rural businesses and communities in regions with limited or unreliable fixed internet options will find LTE helpful in providing a readily available and potentially faster connection for essential services like education, healthcare, and communication.

Construction sites and temporary locations also will benefit where setting up fixed internet infrastructure can be expensive and impractical. Emergency response teams also need LTE during natural disasters or emergencies where primary communication infrastructure might be compromised. First responders can use LTE to coordinate search and rescue operations and citizen communication.

The same goes for mobility situations.  Field service companies where technicians require constant internet access for diagnostics, repairs, and remote support can benefit from Cato X1600-LTE Socket. Transportation and logistics companies with delivery drivers, fleet managers, and transportation hubs can leverage Cato X1600-LTE Socket for secure real-time tracking, delivery route optimization, and communication, ensuring efficient operations on the move.

LTE Connectivity Serves Cato’s Mission to Connect Remote and Mobile Users

The new LTE-enabled connectivity option fits perfectly into the overall Cato Networks strategy of simplifying and enhancing customers’ network security and performance—especially for geographically dispersed organizations or those requiring consistent connectivity on the go. Regardless of where or how customers connect to the Cato SASE Cloud, they get access to a converged cloud platform that merges critical network and security functions into a single, streamlined solution.

A “single pane of glass” management approach provides organizations with a comprehensive view of their entire IT infrastructure, eliminating the need to manage disparate tools and vendors. Cato further simplifies operations by consolidating network security, threat prevention, data protection, and AI-powered incident detection into one platform, reducing complexity and cost and saving valuable time and resources.

Cato provides detailed LTE-relevant statistics such as Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP), Reference Signal Received Quality (RSRQ), and Reference Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) in the new LTE analytics tab of the Cato Management Application.

The LTE Socket is Now Available

The Cato X1600-LTE Socket is a mid-range SD-WAN device that enables optimized and secure enterprise WAN, Internet, and cloud connectivity. The Socket has fiber, copper, and LTE connectivity options. It has dual Micro SIM Standby (DSS), allowing for active standby in the event of failure of the cable connection. It supports up to 150 Mbps for upload, and up to 600 Mbps for download.

To learn more about the Cato Socket, visit https://www.catonetworks.com/cato-sase-cloud/cato-edge-sd-wan/.