As global enterprises become more reliant on cloud—and start to break away or reduce their traditional MPLS circuits—the “middle mile” of the internet is coming into focus.
Today, I want to examine the use cases that vendors hope to address through middle mile network services. (And their basic value proposition.)
“Middle mile” loosely refers to the network segment between local access and destination network.
From the perspective of a potential customer, it might refer to whatever happens between its connection with the service provider and its application in the cloud.
SD-WAN's core promise of optimizing network performance through load balancing—and cutting costs by integrating internet into the WAN—has proven attractive. And it's helped the service take root among many large enterprise network teams.
We've written before about how prices vary by geography.
Well, it almost goes without saying that they also change over time.
In the past few decades, the corporate WAN has undergone a few massive reformations.
Technology such as SD-WAN, migration to the cloud, and the sudden surge of remote and distributed work have upended the modern WAN.
The composition of the underlay, flow of traffic, end points of workers, and security postures are all undergoing a massive shift. Like the protagonist in Canadian power trio Rush’s hit “Tom Sawyer,” WAN managers are realizing that “changes aren’t permanent, but change is.”
If you've perused our research catalog lately, you'll know that we have a new WAN Market Size Report.
In this offering, we present a data-driven, granular view of market opportunity for underlay of the corporate WAN. (More about that here.)
To understand where the larger multinational WAN market stands today, we're sharing three takeaways from the first edition of the WAN Market Size Report.
There’s no question that the enterprise wide area network (WAN) market is in a state of flux.
We’ve seen multiple disruptions in the way multinational corporations construct WANs: a move toward cloud computing, migration of the data center away from corporate premises, and, especially, the introduction of SD-WAN.
To help carriers, vendors, and enterprise IT infrastructure teams understand how these changes will affect the business of telecom, we’ve created the new WAN Market Size Report.
My colleague Elizabeth Thorne and I have been working on busting–or confirming–WAN pricing myths that we’ve heard in the wild. Last time I took on MPLS and DIA price convergence.
I’m going to stick with DIA for this post, too.
Specifically, I want to know if Tier 1 IP providers charge more for DIA service than others. This is a myth I’ve actually argued in favor of in the past. It is certainly true that some carriers can provide a higher level of service, i.e. traffic that takes the fewest hops between destinations, and maybe even traffic that never touches another provider’s network. This might warrant higher prices.
In case you missed my previous post, we here at TeleGeography love busting telecom myths. But we haven’t turned our analytical tools toward common WAN pricing myths—until now!
In this second installment, I’m going to investigate whether MPLS IP VPN and dedicated internet access (DIA) prices have become one and the same.
