As the largest Fixed Wireless Internet Service Provider in the United States, WiLine delivers secure, SLA-guaranteed connectivity and managed network security services to businesses in more than 600 markets nationwide. As demand grew for integrated security at the edge, WiLine needed a way to extend network security services across its fast-growing distributed infrastructure without adding hardware, operational complexity, or deployment delays. To do this, WiLine turned to Zenarmor as a lightweight embedded network security layer purpose-built for service providers.
Customer: WiLine Networks
Industry: Fixed Wireless Internet Service Provider
Location: Princeton, New Jersey, USA
About WiLine
WiLine was founded in 2002 to close a gap its founders saw clearly: traditional internet providers were under-serving businesses with limited options, slow deployment, and inconsistent performance. Starting with clients in Silicon Valley, the company took a different approach, using fixed wireless technology and building its own proprietary software-defined network.
That early focus on owning the network and deploying quickly still shapes how WiLine operates today, and it has since evolved into a provider of integrated connectivity and managed network security services spanning fiber, communications, AI infrastructure, and SASE-enabled managed offerings.
With a presence in more than 600 markets nationwide, WiLine is the biggest Fixed Wireless Internet Service Provider in the US and is expanding rapidly. Its mission has remained constant since the company began: to deliver secure connectivity solutions that empower businesses to thrive in an increasingly digital world.
WiLine combines fiber, fixed wireless, and cloud-native infrastructure to deliver secure connectivity and embedded network security services tailored to each business it serves.
The Challenge: Delivering Embedded Network Security Services at Scale
WiLine faced a challenge familiar to fast-growing service providers: how to deliver scalable, embedded network security services across a distributed edge environment without introducing additional hardware, operational complexity, or deployment delays.
Most SASE and security platforms are designed for enterprises that deploy and manage security one environment at a time. WiLine needed something fundamentally different: a lightweight, multi-tenant security platform that could be embedded directly into its managed connectivity infrastructure and delivered as a bundled value-added service across thousands of customer locations.
As WiLine expanded its managed service offerings, the company needed a way to provide application visibility, policy enforcement, and network security services at the edge while maintaining operational simplicity, rapid provisioning, and independence between transport and security layers.
Why Zenarmor?
Most importantly, Zenarmor aligned with a core WiLine design principle: separating security from transport while integrating both at the platform level. Several factors made Zenarmor the right fit:
- Lightweight architecture suitable for embedded and virtualized environments
- Compatibility with OpenWRT and OPNsense-based systems
- Strong application visibility and traffic classification
- Centralized multi-tenant management via Zenconsole™
- Ability to manage distributed customer environments at scale through a single console
- Integration that does not interfere with SD-WAN transport and routing logic
Together, these capabilities let WiLine embed security directly into its edge platform, deliver application-level visibility and control without dedicated appliances, and maintain independence between SD-WAN transport logic and security enforcement. This gives WiLine a real competitive advantage. The company can deploy faster, serve customers at a lower cost, and reach a much broader market with modular, on-demand security services.
Service providers need security platforms that integrate directly into their infrastructure without forcing architectural compromises. Zenarmor’s latest advancements to its distributed architecture allow us to embed security directly within our network stack, giving customers secure connectivity, full visibility, and operational control rather than relying on external cloud inspection points.
– George Burne, Chief Technology Officer, WiLine Networks
The Evaluation Process
WiLine’s evaluation was driven by architecture, scalability, and service provider alignment rather than a feature-by-feature comparison alone. The team assessed traditional virtual firewall platforms, including:
- Fortinet VM-Series
- Cisco FTDv
- Palo Alto VM-Series
These solutions are also powerful, but WiLine found them resource-intensive, more complex to deploy and operate, and not optimized for lightweight, distributed environments. Zenarmor fit the bill here. It served as a lightweight, embedded security layer ideal for baseline protection and scalable deployment across many sites.
WiLine also evaluated how each option would integrate into its virtualized CPE model, its automated provisioning workflows, and its existing and future SD-WAN architecture. As part of this process, the team reviewed broader SASE and security platforms, including Zscaler, Cloudflare, and Versa Networks VM-based solutions. While also strong in their respective areas, these platforms did not align with WiLine’s requirements due to:
- Technical integration challenges within WiLine’s edge architecture
- A mismatch with WiLine’s need for embedded, edge-based security
- Billing and commercial models that did not fit a service provider delivering bundled services
Benefits and Advantages with Zenarmor
Zenarmor is part of a new architecture for WiLine, not a direct replacement for existing tools. It lets the team avoid deploying heavier firewall solutions where they are unnecessary and introduce tiered security offerings based on individual customer needs.
Zenarmor stands out because it integrates cleanly into lightweight, Linux-based systems, can be deployed as part of a fully automated edge platform, and supports WiLine’s model of modular, multi-tenant, service-delivered network security at scale. The key day-to-day benefits include:
- Rapid deployment within virtualized and embedded edge environments
- Low resource overhead compared to traditional firewalls
- Strong application-level visibility and control
- Centralized multi-tenant management across distributed customer environments
- Security delivery that does not require dedicated hardware
Beyond the day-to-day, Zenarmor supports a modular, multi-tenant, service-based security model, faster onboarding of new customers, and greater flexibility in how WiLine packages and delivers managed network security services.
Success and ROI
While full production metrics are still being developed, WiLine expects measurable impact across several areas:
- Reduced hardware costs by eliminating dedicated firewall appliances in many deployments
- Lower operational overhead thanks to simplified deployment and management
- Faster provisioning times, enabling rapid customer turn-up
The most significant ROI driver, however, is reach. Zenarmor gives WiLine the ability to offer security services across a far broader customer base, including sites that previously could not justify a full firewall deployment.
What’s Next
WiLine is currently integrating Zenarmor within its gateway and edge security architecture, alongside its existing VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud deployment, which today handles traffic steering, transport logic, link optimization, and failover. In this phase, Zenarmor is being evaluated within gateway-based deployments to provide application visibility and policy enforcement, while VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud continues to manage all SD-WAN functions and transport decisions.
Looking further ahead, Zenarmor will become part of a tiered security model offered alongside optional commercial firewall solutions. WiLine’s next steps include:
- Full integration into its automated provisioning pipeline
- Deployment as a standard security layer within the CPE platform
- Exposure of security controls and visibility through the customer portal
As part of its broader SASE roadmap, WiLine is transitioning toward a WiLine-managed CPE firewall platform in which OpenWRT serves as the firewall foundation, Zenarmor is embedded as the primary security and visibility layer, and a WiLine-developed SD-WAN agent takes over uplink control, traffic steering, and application-aware routing. This architecture allows WiLine to separate security from transport while maintaining tight integration within a single edge platform. Deployment began in 2025 and is currently in active development and phased rollout.
Would WiLine Recommend Zenarmor?
The answer is a clear yes. WiLine recommends Zenarmor particularly for:
- Service providers
- Organizations building virtualized or distributed edge infrastructure
- Teams that want lightweight, scalable security without hardware dependency
Zenarmor works best where automation, flexibility, and cost efficiency are priorities alongside strong network security suite, which is the environment WiLine continues to build as it scales secure connectivity to businesses across the country.
