Wan
May 19, 2020

WAN Pricing Mythbusters: Do Tier 1 Carriers Charge More for DIA?

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.
May 14, 2020

WAN Pricing Mythbusters: Can SD-WAN Cut Your Network Spend in Half?

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.)
Apr 21, 2020

WAN Pricing Mythbusters: Is MPLS Priced Like DIA?

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.

Apr 7, 2020

WAN Pricing Mythbusters: Is Local Access 50% or More of the WAN?

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?
Mar 30, 2020

Schrodinger's MPLS and Why Predicting the Future is Hard

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.”
Mar 23, 2020

On TEMs: You Can't Benchmark Your Network if You Don't Understand What You're Buying

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?
Oct 18, 2019

SD-WAN Management Costs, Wargamed

In house or outsourced? This is an age-old question for many firms. 
Aug 28, 2019

WAN Wargaming: What Happens When You Leave MPLS Behind?

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.

Aug 6, 2019

Adding SD-WAN, Keeping MPLS

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.

Aug 1, 2019

Wargaming Your WAN: MPLS-Broadband Edition

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.)

 

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