Unpopular opinion: paying for a premium SD-WAN vendor was a total waste

I dropped $4,800 a year on a big name SD-WAN box for our Chicago office thinking it would fix our latency issues. Turns out our MPLS circuit from the local LEC was the real bottleneck, not the routing. The fancy box sat there doing nothing useful for six months. Has anyone else thrown money at a solution only to find a simpler fix existed?

2 comments

2 Comments

paige_west21d ago

Oh man, you are not alone in that club. I did almost the same thing a few years back for our main office, threw a premium SD-WAN appliance at a problem that was just our ISP being awful during peak hours. Ended up spending way less on a second connection from a different carrier and let the cheap router do basic load balancing, solved everything. Sometimes we just want the shiny fix and skip the basic troubleshooting that actually tells you the real issue. Make sure you test from the device itself, not just your internal network, before you buy anything next time.

taraj1121d ago

The whole "test from the device itself" thing you said really hits home. I had a friend who was convinced their whole network was dying and bought a fancy new firewall, turns out the issue was just their laptop's wifi card acting up and not the actual internet connection. They tested from their computer, saw it was slow, and jumped to conclusions without ever plugging a cable straight into the modem. By the time they figured it out, the return window on the firewall was already closed. It's crazy how easy it is to overthink stuff when you're stressed about a problem.