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 27, 2020

Five Years of SD-WAN Migration Stories, Five Takeaways

We founded the WAN Summit with the intention of creating a space where enterprise network managers and vendors could come together to discuss trends in corporate networking. While our summits cover everything the WAN touches, it’s no secret that one topic has been at the forefront of many attendees’ minds: SD-WAN.

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 17, 2020

WAN Service and Pricing Trends for 2020

The world of WAN services can seem like the Wild West to even the savviest of WAN managers. We try to bring some order to this world with our Cloud and WAN Infrastructure research service.
Apr 14, 2020

WAN Managers Consider Zero Trust Security, Face Challenges in Implementation

In the age of high-profile corporate data breaches (check out that top 10 list if you don’t want to sleep tonight), many WAN managers have security on their minds. Traditionally, enterprises treated their network security like a fortress, creating strong defenses at the perimeters of the network to defend the data and resources inside.
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?
Apr 2, 2020

WAN Managers Mull Over Data Center Strategies

Like many of our readers, I’m currently working from home. And it’s likely that I will be for the foreseeable future. 

Luckily, TeleGeography just completed its move from a local server that had been living in the IT closet of our DC office to Google’s G Suite solution. We can now access shared files using our at-home broadband connection and G Suite authentication. Despite the uncertainty of the current situation, we’re able to carry on (fairly) business-as-usual.

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. (More on that here.)

But why bring up TEMs? Why do we think WAN managers might be interested?

 

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