SD-WAN Vendors: Pricing for Bandwidth

June 26, 2020 Mike Smith

You’ve been hearing about SD-WAN but how much does it cost?

Well, it depends on the type of SD-WAN. [sigh]

For instance, on-prem-only solutions are often priced much differently than cloud-enabled.

So, let’s tackle at least one of them today. In this video, Mike Smith explains the approximate pricing for a cloud-enabled SD-WAN solution, that charges a monthly fee, based on the amount of Internet bandwidth your company needs.

Want to hear which SD-WAN vendors Mike recommends for your company? Click below.

 

About Mikemikesmith
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on LinkedInTwitter or SpiceWorks.

 

Transcript

So your company is looking into SD-WAN, maybe you’re trying to replace an MPLS network, or maybe you’re trying to improve the quality of your site to cloud internet connectivity. Whatever the reason is, I know one of the questions that comes up is how much does SD-WAN cost?

Well, number one, SD-WAN is going to cost different prices depending on the type of SD-WAN architecture that you’re looking into.

For instance, on-prem-only SD-WAN solutions versus cloud-enabled solutions… things like that. It’s just, everything’s a little bit different.

But one thing I wanted to cover today quickly is the cost of a cloud-enabled SD-WAN solution.

So some people refer to this as SD-WAN as a service, but what it is is when an SD-WAN service provider deploys an SD-WAN appliance at each one of your sites, and then those appliances connect up to what they call a cloud gateway, where now you have two-way transmission going on on your SD-WAN service.

So it’s a great, great product, but a lot of times, those solutions are priced according to bandwidth. And so then people go, “Well, how much does it cost if we have 100 meg connection?”

So let me give you some different scenarios. So if you have like a 50M internet connection and you want to use about 50M worth, meaning that say you have a 50M internet connection, and you only need like 25M worth of throughput, but that’s different. But if you have a 50M internet connection and you want to use all 50M of it with SD-WAN, the cost would be between let’s say $100 to $150 a month roughly depending on the vendor.

Now, if you have a 100M internet connection, that cost jumps up a little bit, to, close to maybe $200 per month for that vendor.

And then if you have a gigabit internet connection, that cost could be anywhere between $500 to maybe $700 a month, depending on the vendor.

So I know the question you’re asking is, so say we get a 100M SD-WAN service and we pay for a 100M worth of bandwidth… do they cap all of our bandwidth at a 100?

Yes, they do.

So if you have… say you have two internet connections there. One of them is a 100M fiber internet connection, and then you also have a secondary high speed broadband connection, maybe it’s business-class cable, and maybe that’s a gigabit connection. So you have a 100M fiber and a gigabit cable connection, and you want to use SD-WAN.

Well, the SD-WAN service provider is going to say, “Well, how much bandwidth total do you want between both connections being load balanced at all times?”

So you really have to figure out “how much bandwidth does our company actually need,” not how big your internet connections are… because you may not be using anywhere close that gigabit speed of the cable internet connection. Maybe you just got it because it was a great deal and you might as well get a gig.

SD-WAN Providers - Pricing for Bandwidth

So it depends on how much bandwidth your company is actually going to use. So if your company can be fine with 100M, then you’d purchase 100M. But maybe you want to have the flexibility of going up to 500M, then you’d get a 500M SD-WAN connection.

But the key is whatever speed the SD-WAN connection is that you buy, they’re going to cap all of your bandwidth at that speed across all connections at all times.

So you just want to figure out what is the speed we actually need.

And typically, companies don’t need as much speed as the maximum bandwidth that they have today, especially with the pricing of broadband and how inexpensive it’s gotten. They have these giant gigabit connections that they’re not really using. So, I hope that helps out a little bit. It gives you some perspective in terms of pricing and bandwidth and how it works.

Which cloud-enabled SD-WAN service providers are the best fit for your company?

Call me and ask me. Give me a call (714-593-0011), shoot me an email. I’m happy to give you some recommendations and introduce you to those vendors and the right people at those vendors to talk to who are great to work with, very honest, who will give you great quotes and great demos on their products. Don’t try to call on your own or Google it and try to figure this out. Those providers pay our broker fee, so you don’t even have to pay us. And if you find something you like, we help you buy it from them directly. So it’s no cost to you. There’s no reason why you have to spend hours trying to figure all this stuff out on your own. In fact, these videos, you don’t even have to watch these. Just call me and I’ll give you all this information. And I’ll only give you the information you need. So I hope that helps out a little bit about SD-WAN. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

Have a great day!

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