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Serious question: is it SD-WAN or MPLS for branch offices in 2024?

I was reading through some white papers from a vendor last week and found out that over 60% of enterprise networks still use MPLS as their primary WAN tech... even with all the SD-WAN hype. That stat kind of caught me off guard since I figured everyone was switching over by now. On one hand, MPLS gives you that rock-solid SLA and predictability, but on the other, SD-WAN cuts costs and gives you flexibility with broadband links. Has anyone else seen this split in real deployments or is my data just outdated?

2 comments

2 Comments

anthony_wells21d agoMost Upvoted

Man I see that split all the time. I just helped a friend pick a setup for their regional office chain with about 15 sites. They had MPLS in 12 of them still because the local ISPs just couldn't give them the uptime they needed for their payment processing. We tried SD-WAN with a broadband link at one site and had three outages in the first month alone. The SD-WAN box handled the failover fine but the voice calls dropped every time. So now they're keeping MPLS for their main sites and only using SD-WAN for the tiny satellite offices where losing connection for a few minutes isn't a big deal. I think your stat is dead on. A lot of people talk about switching but when it comes down to real business needs, MPLS still wins for reliability even if it costs more.

ivanb4121d ago

Totally get where you're coming from @anthony_wells. We had a similar thing with a retail client with 20 locations. We kept MPLS on the 8 busiest stores because they run POS and inventory in real time, and the local cable internet kept going down during peak hours. For the other 12, we threw in SD-WAN with two broadband links from different providers and it's been solid enough for email and basic web stuff. The failover is fine but the jitter on voice calls only got acceptable after we tuned the QoS settings hard, so MPLS is still king for anything real time.