Sierra Wireless has announced a multi-purpose, wireless gateway. The AirLink (News - Alert) GX400 gateway offers a wide range of features, including cloud-based device management, extensive hardware and software enhancements, mil-spec ruggedness, GPS and associated location-based services, as well as advanced configuration options.

Flexible and powerful enough to meet the needs of a wide range of applications in the transportation, industrial M2M and enterprise markets, the AirLink GX400 should make solution deployment faster, easier and less expensive for mobile system operators, OEMs, application service providers and end customers. The new gateway will allow system integrators to standardize on a single platform that meets the needs of all of their customers.

In addition, Sierra Wireless (News - Alert) has announced AirLink Management Services (AMS), which will facilitate cloud-based device management for the AirLink GX400, as well as other AirLink intelligent gateways and routers.

Sierra Wireless boosted processing performance five-fold by basing the design on an ARM (News - Alert) 11-class microprocessor architecture operating with high-capacity DDR memory. This provides a powerful foundation for exploiting existing and new features and functionality. Other hardware enhancements include external antenna connectors, Ethernet, Serial and USB "OTG" (On-the-Go), as well as an expansion slot to accommodate future integrated add-on capabilities such as additional physical interfaces and wireless local and personal area networking and communications.

"By combining the best features of our highly successful AirLink Raven and AirLink Pinpoint M2M gateways, the AirLink GX400 provides the most flexible, powerful and cost-effective solution available in the industry today," said Emmanuel Walckenaer, senior vice president and general manager, solutions and services for Sierra Wireless. "Particularly in the dynamic markets of the next few years, today's solutions also have to work for tomorrow's technologies, so we've designed the AirLink GX400 platform to allow easy addition of new capabilities, which provides our distributors and customers a product line that will serve them well into the future."

The AirLink GX400 gateway and AirLink Management Services will be available in second quarter of 2011 with support for 3G+ wireless broadband network technologies and 2G backwards compatibility, including EV-DO/CDMA 1X and HSPA+/EDGE/GPRS variants.