Another December, another opportunity to reflect on the year that was. And that's exactly what we're doing over on TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
This week, Greg Bryan kicks off the first of a two-part telecom year in review, welcoming experts Patrick Christian, Rob Schult, and Jon Hjembo to highlight the major trends they saw in their principal research areas.
As telecom analysts, my TeleGeography colleagues and I have been busy attending conferences and gathering market intelligence from many of the most prominent telecom companies around the world.
Recently, our travels took us to São Paulo and Mexico City for the Futurecom and Mexico Connect 2022 conferences.
There’s a lot going on in both the Brazilian and Mexican markets, so let’s recap some of the discussion themes that stood out.
So far, we’ve looked at several more conservative approaches to constructing a hybrid WAN.
But what if we went all the way down the rabbit hole to an all Internet WAN?
For example, throwing a lot of bandwidth at the network and letting SD-WAN take care of the internet performance.
The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the way we work. And our next scenario illustrates the reality that many IT infrastructure managers are currently facing.
(If you're new here, check out the first post in this series first.)
A large portion of the workforce is now remote at least part of the week. When employees are in the office, they continue to utilize bandwidth-hungry applications like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet to stay connected.
As such, many enterprises are thinking of consolidating the number of sites they have—while increasing bandwidth in those that remain open—in an effort to save money.
So far, we’ve looked at integrating DIA and business broadband into a hybrid WAN. But there are a host of other network services that corporate networks teams have employed in their network transformations.
Our next scenario represents an Internet-first WAN with data center sites, a BYOB (bring your own backbone), if you will.
This customer may be someone with their own servers looking to build a fiber loop around the globe to connect them, even if they are at a neutral facility.
Use of the internet in corporate WANs is quickly growing. And for good reason.
Not only are internet services such as DIA and broadband cheaper than MPLS, many of the SaaS applications and cloud services that enterprises have adopted have been optimized to work over local internet connections rather than through central internet breakouts.
In addition, SD-WAN has emerged as a tool that allows WAN managers to incorporate these lower cost internet services into their network without sacrificing performance or security. But not every network site (or enterprise customer) is a good fit for an all internet WAN.
In our next two scenarios, we take an approach that we see many enterprises taking—designating network sites into tiers and assigning different network services to each tier. This allows companies to add in local internet breakouts at most offices, but keep some MPLS at higher priority sites that need service level assurances.
Back in 2019, we built a hypothetical network to illustrate how different network configurations might affect total cost of ownership (TCO).
Now that it's nearly 2023, we got to thinking, if Cheaper By the Dozen can get a reboot, why can't our hypothetical network series?
So here we are. The world has changed a lot in the last three years, and WAN managers are also facing a number of changes.
Our latest Global Internet Geography Research Service refresh came with new pricing data.
And if you'd like a sample of this new data, you've come to the right place. Let's jump right in, shall we?
Welcome back, podcast listeners. We're thrilled to dive into a new season of telecom tech talk.
First, you might have noticed that we look a little different than when we were last in your headphones. That's because we did a little old-fashioned rebranding while on summer break. What was once the WAN Manager Podcast is now TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
Last week, Senior Research Manager Patrick Christian shared an African network geography update with the African Peering and Interconnection Forum.
Patrick's keynote showcased fresh TeleGeography data with a look at global bandwidth trends, followed by a deeper dive into African network trends.
If you weren't among the audience in Kigali, you can still catch the recording below.
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