Data Centers and the Opportunity at the Edge
When I reached out to today's podcast guest—Jim Poole, Vice President of Business Development at Equinix—about being on the show, I asked if he'd be willing to dig into NaaS or edge data centers.
Greg is Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. He's spent the last decade and a half at TeleGeography developing many of our pricing products and reports about enterprise networks. He is a frequent speaker at conferences about corporate wide area networks and enterprise telecom services. He also hosts our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
When I reached out to today's podcast guest—Jim Poole, Vice President of Business Development at Equinix—about being on the show, I asked if he'd be willing to dig into NaaS or edge data centers.
If you’re an enterprise network manager in need of a dedicated cloud connection service, you’re in luck; you’ve got a wide array of service providers and locations to choose from.
You could set up a link directly with the cloud provider, but why not use a third-party—such as a carrier, colocation provider, or connectivity specialist?
The question then changes. Who are you going to choose? And where will you set up your connections? This often depends on the location of your enterprise WAN in relation to the cloud providers’ regions or data centers.
In this analysis, we’ll explore options available to network managers.
In a recent analysis, we highlighted how DIA has gained ground as an integral part of the global enterprise WAN and how it compares in price directly to MPLS.
However, it is not just a matter of switching underlay products, but also understanding the global pricing dynamics of those alternatives.
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.)
We've written before about how prices vary by geography. It almost goes without saying that they also change over time.
Over the last 15 years of price tracking, we've consistently observed annual declines of around 10% to 20% over the long term. We can see slower or more rapid declines in some locations or bandwidths, but prices always go down over longer terms.
In the past few decades, the corporate WAN has undergone a few massive reformations.
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.
Copyright © 2025 TeleGeography.