Broadcom hopes converged network appliance will ease 5G struggles – News

Addressing what it says is a fragmented and ad hoc approach to network services deployment that has hampered wireless network deployment, Broadcom Inc. today debuted VeloSky, a converged networking appliance targeted at communications service providers that want to offer integrated fiber, cellular and satellite connectivity through a single appliance.

Broadcom said it hopes to address the high installation and operation costs that have prevented CSPs from realizing hoped-for profits from 5G networks. “The investments for 5G have not been recouped, let alone returnee good margins,” said Sanjay Uppal, vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s VeloCloud division. “It has been difficult to monetize.”

VeloSky is designed for and tightly integrated with service provider networks. It supports wired, 5G fixed wireless access and satellite connections, eliminating the need for separate hardware devices for each type of connectivity. A unified console monitors fiber, fixed wireless access and satellite connections. “It’s a one-stop shop for fixed wireless access and converged connectivity,” Uppal said.

The new appliance is built on the Velo Robust AI Networking, an architecture that leverages artificial intelligence to improve network performance and security by identifying and prioritizing encrypted application traffic. The combination gives CSPs the ability to deploy a combination of services from a single appliance with fine-grained control and visibility.

Broadcom said AI is changing network traffic patterns in unexpected ways. An analysis of customers that have deployed services to more than 1,000 sites found that about 40% of traffic was uploads, compared to about 10% for more traditional network deployments.

This is because large language models “expect to have a lot of context because of RAG [retrieval-automated generation], which is usually sent from endpoints, goes upstream and has to be munged and then come downstream,” Uppal said. Agentic AI, which has software agents communicating with each other peer-to-peer, puts a premium on latency, creating further complexity for field deployments. “Latency has to be defined or the requesting agent is essentially going to run out of time,” Uppal said.

Single appliance

VeloSky integrates wired and wireless networks into a single appliance that allows CSPs to prioritize traffic according to the needs of each application, regardless of the combination of wired and wireless services being used. Dynamic multipath optimization directs traffic based on real-time performance metrics. Dynamic application-based slicing, which orchestrates specific capabilities in different parts of the network in real-time, allocates bandwidth and prioritizes essential applications.

“You can work with your customers to define certain application level slices such as real -time media or applications used by first responders,” Uppal said. “You can essentially define which application should get the best quality of service and then specify by policy that certain applications should be pinned into certain underlays going forward. Then you can set global policies to say this particular underlay should be favored over the other one.”

For security, VeloSky includes a set of network security features built into the edge device to support functions such as intrusion detection and prevention, URL filtering, application-aware stateful inspection, malicious IP filtering and traffic segmentation. Broadcom said this helps eliminate the need for an external firewall.

VeloSky is available today. Pricing wasn’t specified.

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