In our effort to help businesses navigate the ever-changing digital landscape to meet their connectivity needs, we often come across legacy private Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) data service. From our experience, we’ve found that MPLS based WAN has 2 major headaches for network administrators:
1. Cost prohibitive: up to 10X the price of typical Internet connections
2. Lack of general availability: coverage issues, local loop installation
A surprising and overlooked consequence we’ve found is that roughly 8% of MPLS based WAN branches aren’t actually MPLS at all – they’re over the public Internet because of reach or high cost. This means almost 1 in every 10 MPLS branches doesn’t adhere to corporate WAN policies (security, application assurance, redundancy, and etc).
To dig deeper on the problem of network consistency, we created a Case Study, “Growing Business Leverages Internet to Achieve Enterprise Class Wide Area Network.” In this Case Study, we share how Bonded Internet addressed the lack of uniformity by giving the Company a more versatile and cost-effective way to connect all their branches while still providing fully dedicated and secure links over which they can comfortably send mission-critical data. Now, the Company has a consistent network platform that enhances communication and coordination – across 100% of the sites.
We also share our insight on the limitations of MPLS on a LinkedIn Post, “Enterprise Class WAN, Leverage the Internet.” 3 key takeaways from examining Bonded Internet vs. MPLS are:
1. Increased Speed: Bonded Internet outperforms a T1-based MPLS in terms of download speed by more than 330%.
2. Lower Cost: Bonded Internet cut total WAN spend by 53% by leveraging readily available Internet connections.
3. Network Consistency: Bonded Internet offers a creative solution to get all the benefits of MPLS, but control costs and maintain uniformity across the WAN.
Businesses can ill afford to underserve a sizable proportion of their branches. The missing 8% we identified demonstrates the inability of MPLS to tailor a WAN solution that aligns with the unique set of needs and challenges of each organization. MPLS is constrained by geography and cost – antithesis of the notion of fluidity inherent in how businesses actually work and collaborate. It’s also opposite of what we believe in.