SD-WAN vs MPLS: Bandwidth

What is the difference between SD-WAN and MPLS, in terms of bandwidth? Your company currently has MPLS but you are wondering if moving to SD-WAN will increase your bandwidth. How does that work?

In this short video, Mike will explain how SD-WAN will increase your company’s overall WAN speed.

Transcript:

Hi, this is Mike Smith, President of AeroCom, the best way for your company to shop and purchase telecommunications, Internet, and cloud services.

Okay, so today I’m going to talk to you again about SD-WAN versus MPLS. In particular, I’m going to talk to you today about bandwidth.

Alright, so I’ve gotten the question a lot, “how is my bandwidth going to increase if we go from MPLS to SD-WAN?” That’s a great question.

SD-WAN itself is not going to increase your bandwidth.

The reason why everybody says with SD-WAN, you can have a lot more bandwidth than MPLS, is because once you start getting to like 100 MB or more of MPLS bandwidth, the price point goes through the roof. If you want like a 500 MB MPLS connection or a 1 GB MPLS connection, that’s going to be a really expensive connection compared to just like a 500 MB dedicated Internet access connection or a GB dedicated Internet access connection.

It’s going to be way off-the-chart expensive compared to a broadband cable connection or any other type of broadband connection like AT&T “ABF,” or CenturyLink “Fiber +” or any of those.

SD-WAN doesn’t increase your Internet but what it does is it allows you to use those less expensive Internet connections and aggregate them together to end up giving you a lot more bandwidth than you’d be able to get for the same dollar amount for MPLS. For the same amount you’re paying today for a MPLS network, you could probably get double to triple (or even more) the amount of bandwidth than you have today by combining say like a dedicated fiber Internet connection with a high speed broadband connection and have the SD-WAN aggregate those two together so that it’s load balancing all of your Internet traffic and cloud traffic and WAN traffic over those connections at all times.

That’s how SD-WAN increases your bandwidth.

I hope that was helpful!

If you have any questions, as always shoot me an e-mail or call me.

If you want to look at SD-WAN vendors and see which offer different types of features or service areas, go to our website, AeroComInc.com and in the search bar type in ‘SD-WAN’ and you’ll find our SD-WAN provider-finder. You can search over 100 different SD-WAN providers by feature, functionality, service area, all that cool stuff. Check that out.

I hope that was helpful and I will see you again next time.

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About the Host
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. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.