How Private Wireless Gateways Work: A Tech Deep-Dive

What are Private Wireless Gateways?

Private Wireless Gateways allow you to deploy physical devices, like an IoT device or a handset, to the edge of your corporate network in a highly secure and accessible manner. This means that you can treat these physical devices similar to any other device that's connected to your corporate network, like a virtual machine in the cloud or a router in your data center.

This is useful from a security standpoint, because your devices are no longer directly connected to the public internet. While the public internet does not lower the quality of communications from IoT devices, it does make them more vulnerable. Security is the most important obstacle to overcome for any IoT deployment, and when huge fleets of SIMs are deployed onto the public internet you now have a major attack vector.

Furthermore, because devices routed on a Private Wireless Gateway sit inside your own private IP address space, they are directly accessible by other devices in that IP space. This means that you have more control, as all traffic to and from your IoT SIM Cards can now be passed through your own firewall or data loss prevention (DLP) platform.

Private Wireless Gateway architecture

Private Wireless Gateways are dedicated pieces of infrastructure that you can create via the Telnyx API or portal to ensure that the request flow of your data is entirely siloed from the public internet.

Private Wireless Gateways leverage virtual routing and forwarding (VRF). VRF enables more than one routing table to exist on a single router, thereby creating secure, private networks (sometimes called "VRF-defined networks") within a wider network.

The wider network in question is the Telnyx global IP network --- a private network of multi-cloud points of presence (PoPs) across the globe, interconnected by a private multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) fiber backbone.

Private Wireless Gateways connect your SIM cards to a VRF-defined network on the Telnyx backbone, allowing the SIM to connect directly to a variety of network interfaces. You can think of the VRF-defined network as a slice of Telnyx's private IP network.

Other network interfaces can also be connected to your slice of the Telnyx private IP network. With Telnyx Cloud VPN, Wireguard VPN interfaces can be connected to your VRF-defined network, linking your corporate network and cloud infrastructure with our private IP network. Virtual Cross Connects (VXCs) will allow for more direct and performant interfaces between your cloud environment and our private IP network. All interfaces on the same VRF-defined network can see each other, allowing traffic to flow from Private Wireless Gateways to Cloud VPNs and/or VXCs.

In an upcoming feature release, Public Internet Gateways will enable your VRF-defined network---and your SIMs connected to that network---to access the public internet.

Secure Cellular Connectivity Providers

When getting started with a connectivity provider for your IoT devices, it's important to find a provider that can provide the technical infrastructure you need to build and maintain your network. As a tier-one carrier, we work directly with our roaming partners around the globe to ensure that your SIM fleet can connect reliably and securely.

Our self service portal and API let you purchase SIMs, register and configure them, and spin up a fully secure, private LTE network in a quick, intuitive process. Telnyx IoT SIMs are available in two form factors: triple size (Mini, Micro and Nano) SIM cards and embedded MFF2 SIMs. In addition, our Wireless offering has key features to deliver an easy-to-use solution that lets you move fast and reduce your go to market time:

• Gain full control over traffic routing and management.

• Connect your SIM fleet to your corporate network and mobile terminate to them anytime with ease.

• Ensures that data to and from your SIMs are secure, encrypted, and inaccessible from the public internet.

• Access to granular data including time stamped sessions and SIM groups for fleet management at scale.

• Our API reference, developer documentation, and easy-to-use portal to empower your business to minimize the time for procurement and integration.

If you're ready to take the next step, try out Private Wireless Gateways!