The Blog

"In previous iterations of the WAN, you might have seen one large MPLS cloud, but with core sites having a larger MPLS port than edge sites. Now we're seeing a lot more technology differentiation between core versus middle tier versus edge sites." 

A self-proclaimed "data guy," TeleGeography Senior Analyst and Data Science Manager Mike Bisaha has spent years building tools to help IT managers better understand their networks' performance, design, and cost.

And he's learned a lot about the modern WAN in the process. 

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Jayne Miller

The first challenge in sourcing internet is deciding what you need. Finding a balance between cost and performance is so important because in an internet world, you're going to have a lot more choice than in an MPLS world.

This advice comes from Globalinternet Chief Portfolio Officer Mike Lloyd.

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Jayne Miller

Would you be happy to have your fingerprints taken or get a facial scan to access phone services? Or would you consider it intrusive?

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Pete Bell

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.

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Greg Bryan

Welcome back to the third installment of our mythbusting series, where we break down legends in telecom pricing and see if they hold water. (Don’t miss our investigations on tall tales in local access budgeting and MPLS/DIA pricing lore.)

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Elizabeth Thorne

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.

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Greg Bryan

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?

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Greg Bryan

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.”

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Greg Bryan

In December 2019, UK telecom giant BT Group agreed to sell BT Espana to investment fund Portobello Capital. This was the first part of its plan to dismantle and sell off its sprawling BT Global Services unit. This month, BT agreed to offload its Latin American businesses to CIH Telecommunications Americas, marking the second confirmed transaction.

Today we examine BT’s motivations and take a closer look at other businesses that are likely to be sold off.

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Tom Leins