We’re often asked how much money we can save with SD WAN, often due to bold claims for huge savings to be made moving international MPLS traffic to the internet. We have always maintained that for UK focussed networks these particular benefits don’t arise because MPLS and Internet are similarly-priced. However, that does not mean that there are not savings to be made.

In our Guide to SD WAN Benefits, we highlighted a number of benefits that SD WAN can bring. Many of these benefits are performance related. However, a number of them imply the ability to reduce costs. While some can be hard to quantify, those that relate to circuit cost reductions are easier to illustrate.

This illustration shows two circuit cost reductions that you may be able to seek after moving to SD WAN. We have focussed on two areas for cost reduction:

• Those that derive from the ability to reduce circuit bandwidths

• Those that derive from the ability to remove CoS

We have specifically avoided the movement of traffic from MPLS to Internet, given our point that UK focussed networks do not experience the same price differential as international networks.