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.)
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.)
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.
But why bring up TEMs? Why do we think WAN managers might be interested?
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.
Hello and welcome to the third entry in our series about wargaming WAN configuration scenarios. We’ve made it to the MPLS-broadband edition!
Before we continue: if you haven’t read the previous entries where I introduce our hypothetical WAN and then add local internet breakouts with DIA, it probably makes sense to do that before you dive into this one. (This scenario mirrors our last, but replaces DIA with ISP-sourced business broadband.)
Copyright © 2025 TeleGeography.
