Brianna Boudreau

It’s been almost a decade since SD-WAN burst onto the scene, and the service is undeniably a critical component of today’s enterprise WAN. 

The core benefits associated with SD-WAN technology are consistent across all provider offerings—reduced cost and network complexity, ease of upgrades and policy changes, increased flexibility and network performance, and increased visibility into application performance.

But a dizzying array of SD-WAN service options still remain in the market.

Providers continue to add new service and security features to distinguish themselves in a crowded marketplace. And this multitude of different service options are reflected in the range of reported prices in the market.

Luckily, there is a light at the end of the tunnel: TeleGeography’s 2025 SD-WAN Vendor Guide.

Enterprise customers have embraced hybrid networks that employ multiple underlay technologies combined with an SD-WAN overlay. And for good reason.

Many SaaS applications and cloud services have been optimized to work over local internet connections rather than through central internet breakouts. The integration of an SD-WAN overlay addresses many of the concerns about network performance and security that come along with incorporating internet into the WAN.

And as we detailed in our recent blog series, the DIA and broadband services included in these hybrid networks are often cheaper than MPLS–sometimes considerably so. This allows WAN managers to reduce network spend or increase their capacity while staying within the same budget.

But even after enterprise customers have undergone a network transformation, it is still imperative for them to keep tabs on the market and assess what their network should cost. Particularly if their network contract includes a benchmarking clause.

With the latest update of our enterprise port pricing, we looked back at some previous hypothetical network scenarios to see how the cost of network ownership can change over time.