Underlay Episode 64: MPLS Is Dead, Long Live MPLS
Back on Network Collective's Underlay with Jordan Martin and Eyvonne Sharp. The early SD-WAN hype said MPLS was dead. Several years in, Matt Ouellette and I talked through what customers were actually doing when they picked circuits for their SD-WAN.
26 June 2019 · 1 min read
Network Collective's Underlay podcast, Episode 64. Published 26 June 2019. Hosts: Jordan Martin and Eyvonne Sharp. Guests: Matt Ouellette and me.
The initial SD-WAN hype claimed MPLS was dead, because SD-WAN was going to remove any need for SLA-backed circuits. By mid-2019 the industry had several years and a lot of deployments under its belt, so Jordan and Eyvonne wanted to know whether the hype had been right. Matt Ouellette and I had both been deploying SD-WAN for real customers and had watched what they chose once the marketing wore off.
What we covered
Whether the original "MPLS is dead" claim held up, and where it did not. What real customers were doing when they selected circuits for their SD-WAN: who went all-internet, who kept a private circuit at key sites, and why. The trade-offs that actually drove those decisions, latency, application sensitivity, voice, and the difference between what a CIO expected to save and what the network could deliver. My position by then was already the one I still hold: the obituary was premature, and the reasons why are the interesting part.
