Before You Get Your MPLS Quote…;

Evaluating MPLS Pricing: 5 Steps You Need to Know Before Gathering Quotes

As you are aware, as mid-size company, you probably rely (or will rely), on your Private IP VPN/MPLS network for transmitting nearly every form of company communication, every second of the day. Therefore, when you evaluate MPLS pricing quotes, you don’t want to miss something that a provider may not tell you… like the one feature that can change the way your network runs yet the handful of providers (you randomly selected), do not offer.

As a provider-agnostic representative for every major MPLS provider in the US (over the last 15 years), I have sat in thousands of meetings with IT Department Heads, helping them compare MPLS pricing and feature packages from all available providers. The biggest mistake I see is not the lack of ability to negotiate price. Instead, it’s the lack of information on what features some providers offer and which providers are offering them. I know the salespeople you are quoting seem nice but if their company doesn’t offer these features, they surely will not tell you!

There are tens of features that we could cover but for sake of time, I’ve narrowed it down to the 5 least known yet most impactful features that you need to be aware of when purchasing a new MPLS network or evaluating your existing MPLS service provider (upon contract renewal).

1. Application Performance Management (APM) Tool – I don’t have to tell you that one problem you can’t avoid is a user calling, reporting that his/her application is running slow, their voice call dropped, etc. How much time and troubleshooting will it save your staff if at that moment, they can have a tool that will show real-time and back-in-time reporting and diagnostics on every application running on your network, down to the MAC address level? What if that feature will barely affect your monthly or installation pricing, if at all? That feature exists and it will not significantly impact your quotes but it is only available with specific MPLS providers. Watch out for providers saying they can do this when in reality, their tool can’t see past the router.
2. Real-Time MPLS Bandwidth Adjustment – Is your business seasonal or do you occasionally need a lot of bandwidth at one of your sites, for streaming or video conferencing? If so, there are a few MPLS network providers that (via a web portal), you can log in and adjust the bandwidth of any of your sites, real time. Only a few providers can do this but when it’s available, the pricing isn’t that much more expensive than the regular price. Another way of doing the same thing is purchasing a Burstable MPLS connection (at the site that occasionally needs it), which not all providers offer. Burstable is very common with Internet connections but only a few providers allow Burstable access with MPLS.
3. Direct MPLS Network Access to 3^rd Party Cloud Providers – Do you have a cloud application that you purchase through a 3rd party vendor (i.e. hosted exchange, hosted PBX, hosted server), but (for security and quality reasons), you want to run through your MPLS network? Did you know that every month, MPLS service providers are signing more and more agreements to directly connect their networks to the most popular 3rd party cloud application providers? If you fall into this category, before you get MPLS pricing, you should call around to service providers and determine if any of them are connected to your preferred cloud provider.
4. Automatic MPLS-to-IP – SEC VPN Failover Some MPLS service providers can quote you pricing on the ability to have a back-up 4G cellular Internet connection (or any other type of Internet connection), at each site and (should your network fail), have all MPLS network traffic automatically fail-over to an IP-SECVPN on that Internet connection. Even better, it will VPN directly into your MPLS network instead of just VPNing directly to another site. MPLS pricing on a 4G Internet connection isn’t very expensive compared to the loss of productivity (payroll x percentage of efficiency lost), when a site goes down.
5. SIP via Your MPLS Network – Afraid that implementing SIP will have call quality implications? You are right…sometimes. SIP call quality is NEVER guaranteed over the public Internet and big Internet bandwidth does not fix call killers like jitter, latency and packet loss, over the public Internet. Nevertheless, when the SIP service provider is the same as your MPLS provider and they are streaming the SIP sessions directly to your site via your MPLS network, call quality becomes guaranteed (since you can control your MPLS network quality). Did you also know that with SIP, some providers will allow you to give each separate direct phone number (DID), two or more alternate failover routes (at other sites)? You can’t do that with PRI! In addition, some MPLS providers also offer Hosted PBX. By keeping your MPLS and Hosted PBX provider the same, you get guaranteed call quality, plus all of the benefits of SIP and Hosted PBX. You can also utilize your un-used voice bandwidth for MPLS or Internet access when calls aren’t taking place. Cost can vary on all of these items but quotes for MPLS pricing (with adding hosted PBX or SIP), typically result in dramatic cost savings since the company is consolidating their MPLS network and Voice network.

I hope that helps and you at least learned one or two cool MPLS features that you were not aware of. If you’d like more information on these features or other features and the providers that offer them, call AeroCom. Remember, you don’t have to do all this research on your own! You don’t have the time. We do. You know your network and we know providers, features & pricing. Call AeroCom today or at least find another good agency to work with.