The results are in.
According to our research, the global SD-WAN market for large multinational enterprises is worth $3 billion. This accounts for just 5% of the total market.
You may be wondering how we calculated these numbers.
TeleGeography’s WAN Market Size Report uses a data-driven model—with insights from our WAN Manager Survey and WAN Cost Benchmark—to provide a granular view of the market opportunity for the underlay network or corporate WAN.
Our team used the total number of global corporate WAN sites and market price ranges as key variables, with static assumptions about the geographic distribution of network sites, mix of connectivity products, bandwidths, distance of local loops, and SD-WAN rollouts.
What else did we find?
Local loops connecting customer sites to direct internet access (DIA) are worth $3.8 billion—or 6% of the market.
Meanwhile, MPLS is worth $17 billion and maintains 29% of the global WAN market. Together, MPLS and access loops connecting to MPLS PoPs account for 60% of the market for large multinational enterprise WANs. All together, MPLS and DIA port charges remain the largest contributor at $33.6 billion, followed by local access charges at $22.1 billion.
All together, MPLS and DIA port charges remain the largest contributor at $33.6 billion, followed by local access charges at $22.1 billion.
“SD-WAN adoption is ramping up globally, but MPLS still remains the dominant networking technology. It’s interesting to note that DIA market share is larger than SD-WAN. The market for internet underlay services is slightly larger than overlay,” said Senior Manager Greg Bryan. “Overall, the WAN market has diversified and, across geographies, the pricing differences within product sets vary considerably. For example, compared to other well-developed countries, the U.S. is a more expensive local access and broadband market.”
We attribute the market diversification and disruption to how multinational corporations design and source their networks to cloud computing, the migration of the data center away from corporate premises, local internet breakouts, and the introduction of SD-WAN.
“Currently, MPLS exceeds SD-WAN, although we expect a considerable shift in the next few years as businesses demand better flexibility, reliability, and cloud access,” said Bryan. “Moving forward, reliance on MPLS and private access from customer sites to MPLS PoPs will lessen, and we predict that this is likely to have a material impact on the business of selling corporate networks.”
About WAN Market Size
Inside TeleGeography’s WAN Market Size Report, you’ll find:
- The total range of global WAN revenues across hundreds of runs of our model
- The contribution of each product to the total WAN market size including MPLS port revenue, DIA port revenue, local access revenue, business broadband revenue, and SD-WAN revenue
- Separate WAN market revenue data for nine geographic regions
- Results are broken out by product revenue, geographic region, and country
Get a free, detailed brochure about this product over here.
Greg Bryan
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.
