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.
We have a years-long tradition of Mythbusting here at TeleGeography. But it occurred to me that we’ve never tackled any of the WAN pricing myths floating around out there. That’s why I decided to do a series addressing some of the things I hear from WAN-sourcing and WAN-selling professionals.
Let’s see if these WAN pricing myths stack up against the data.
First up: is it true that, particularly for traditional MPLS networks, local access can account for upwards of 50% of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of WAN components?
Predicting the future is hard, especially when it comes to complex markets with disruptive variables that are difficult/impossible to model. In his excellent book Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman provides stark examples of how bad humans can be at doing just that.
In this excerpt, Kahneman details how he tracked the performance records of 25 professional wealth managers across eight years. He found that “[t]he results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.”
Let's talk about telecom expense management, better known as TEM.
TEMs are designed to make untangling telecom investments a little easier. For larger organizations with bigger telecom bills, this can be huge for streamlining costs and saving dollars. (More on that here.)
But why bring up TEMs? Why do we think WAN managers might be interested?
At this point, the spread of COVID-19 seems inevitable in much of the world. Working from home, if possible, is more than just a good idea. It’s a mandate from employers and governments around the globe.
While many folks are considering the social and business implications of a potentially permanent increase in remote workers, at TeleGeography we’re of course thinking about what this means for WAN and IT infrastructure managers worldwide.
In house or outsourced? This is an age-old question for many firms.
Welcome back to our blog series on “wargaming” WAN configurations to see how product choice can affect site bandwidth and total WAN costs. If you’re just joining us, it’s probably worth going back to the beginning.
When we last left off, my colleague Elizabeth Thorne covered minimizing MPLS down to the core offices. The next couple of entries, however, are going to focus on the radicals. Yes, the daring folks who decide to leave behind MPLS and go full internet.
My wife has a brutal Northern Virginia commute; she drives about 80 miles a day. Recently, we decided it was time for a new car for her.
