TeleGeography Explains the Internet

Get ready. There's a new season of the WAN Manager Podcast coming to your feeds next week.  This season will be our biggest yet. It’s so big, we couldn’t contain our conversations to just the WAN. That’s why the WAN Manager Podcast is now: TeleGeography Explains the Internet. New name. More content. Same great show. See you next week.

Anyone in the WAN business—from the carrier or end-user side—knows that local access can present some of the biggest challenges in corporate networks. There's a physical geography problem that's not easy to overcome. We're talking about pulling and maintaining wires to all corporate sites, which is especially challenging when customers need physical diversity and protection. Wireless has long been...

While NaaS and the middle mile are fairly new concepts, they're not new to the podcast. In episodes past, we've highlighted the framework, concept, market players, and products available. Now we consider things from another perspective. Ameet Naik, Director of Product Marketing at Cloudflare, takes center stage to help us tackle some real-world NaaS use cases. The WAN Manager Podcast is now TeleGe...

The TeleGeography team began benchmarking networks almost a decade ago. (Time flies when you're having fun!) Back then, the big use case was making sure that carrier and customer were on the same page about how much MPLS and access prices had fallen over the life of a contract—and how far prices would probably fall in the next several years. We still do some benchmarks that look like this. But, mo...

Our readers likely know about NaaS: cloud-based network architecture that allows a WAN manager to stitch together different enterprise network components in a self-service, automated way. We've been watching the ways in which NaaS has emerged as specific products/solutions from vendors, as well as how it integrates with existing WAN strategies from the enterprise side. Of course, there's a lot to...

Here's a hot take: the networking hype cycle has moved on from SD-WAN in favor of SASE and now SSE. To help us navigate how these changes are impacting the modern infrastructure team—especially with respect to SD-WAN—Greg welcomes Nav Chander, Head of Service Provider SD-WAN/SASE Product Marketing at Aruba, to the podcast. The WAN Manager Podcast is now TeleGeography Explains the Internet. Hosted...

Two years ago—when the world shut down—WAN managers had to scramble to accommodate massive changes. Offices transitioned to remote work and navigated brand new traffic patterns. Our guest on this week's episode navigated the added challenge of running a network within the healthcare industry, where business needs were changing in real-time. Carl Flaherty, Manager of Network Services at Main Line H...

Although WAN managers have always had to be aware of internet performance and outages, this is increasingly crucial in the internet-first WAN era. To explore how global events, natural or human, impact the internet and how to stay on top of those headlines, we welcome a leading expert on this topic to the show. Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Kentik, sits with Greg to get into recent...

Coevolve CTO Ciaran Roche is back on the pod. And he's in the hot seat to discuss how middle mile solutions are selected to solve real-world enterprise WAN issues. When Ciaran joined us last year, we spent lots of time talking about cloud adoption and SD-WAN. You might remember that we discussed how freeing up the transport layer from single-source carrier WANs had created a brand new challenge: h...

When it comes to the cloud and digital transformation of the enterprise, it's always useful to come back to the fact that physical geography matters to our digital world. Moving the data center off-premises or shifting data and workloads to the cloud doesn’t dematerialize this fact. You still need wires that connect to servers that sit in a rack at a hyperscaler or neutral data center facility. Mo...

We've crunched the numbers from our survey of WAN managers in 2021 and our new analysis is ready and waiting. What'd we find? To start, the extended effects of COVID-related remote work have accelerated WAN trends like migration to the cloud, SD-WAN adoption, and incorporating alternative access technologies into the underlay. Network managers at large multinational corporations are now faced with...

One of the earliest and most persistent use cases for SD-WAN has been the ability to utilize alternative connectivity options like internet and fixed wireless. And our WAN Manager Survey data has shown us that, since 2018, MPLS has been losing ground to other wireline alternatives like DIA and broadband. Over that same period, wireless grew as a percentage of sites in our study—but it still repres...

Network automation pops up often on the pod. But, you know what's under-discussed? The HR aspect of upskilling IT workers and/or acquiring the right talent to make this transformation and manage it going forward. Greg welcomes Michael Martin, Senior Expert of Networking and Network Security at McKinsey & Co to get into it. The pair covers the basics of network automation, getting engineers/net...

We're going to talk about the cloud. More specifically, cloud outages and how to avoid them and mitigate their impacts. There's no way we can dig into this topic without touching on multicloud strategies. Even back in 2019—when we surveyed WAN managers about their organization’s cloud infrastructure—we found that three in four enterprises had already gone multicloud, with at least two IaaS provide...

If you caught last week's special episode of the pod, you must be waiting on the edge of your seat for the second installment. To recap, Greg Bryan and Elizabeth Thorne are keeping up their tradition of decking the halls with an end-of-year WAN review. And since 2021 was such a big year, we couldn't fit everything into just one episode. To compensate for the cliffhanger, we've packed part two with...

In this podcast holiday special, we're shaking the snow globe that is the 2021 WANscape. Greg welcomes back TeleGeography Analyst Elizabeth Thorne to present another year in review.  To keep the conversation on track, Elizabeth made a list (and checked it twice), but we couldn't fit everything into one episode. Part 1 covers SASE adoption, SD-WAN maturation, how remote work is changing the face of...

While a fifteen-year friendship with Greg is not a prerequisite for guests on the pod, it sure makes for good conversation.  To kick off Season 3 of the pod, Greg calls on longtime colleague Rob Schult, who also happens to be a Research Director here at TeleGeography, to draw a connection between the wholesale and enterprise retail markets. What should IT infrastructure and sourcing teams pay atte...

As we dig into technical standards and definitions, MEF has come up several times on this show. It was only a matter of time before we put them in the hot seat. In our latest conversation, Greg welcomes MEF CTO Pascal Menezes to walk us through the work the MEF is doing on standardizing the enterprise network. Why is SD-WAN certification a good idea? How is the WAN developing? What is MEF doing in...

Listeners know that we've covered middle mile and NaaS on this show. And we've touched on the various companies that are emerging around these issues. Today we're getting extra perspective from one of those companies. Greg welcomes Dave Ward, CEO of PacketFabric, to talk through the bigger picture of how these services are emerging in the enterprise network market. The WAN Manager Podcast is now T...

When TeleGeography started tracking the SD-WAN market in 2017, we found dozens of vendors with a service they were calling "SD-WAN." But are all of these services created equal? What does it take for your solution to qualify as SD-WAN? Today we pull back and discuss SD-WAN definitions and certification. Greg aims to better understand the exact definition of SD-WAN and how related certification can...

Are you like the (approximately) half of our survey respondents who have not yet adopted SD-WAN? Or perhaps you're in the midst of deployment and want to know what to look out for. Or maybe you're working out whether or not to keep MPLS? Today we'll share some perspective on these questions with another case study, this time with Mark Williams, Sr. Manager of Global Networks at BorgWarner. The WAN...

Today we're living on the edge! Whether we're talking security and SASE, NaaS, or cloud computing—or many other topics, honestly—edge networks and edge computing are likely to make it into the conversation. Greg welcomes two experts from Catchpoint to help us dig in: CEO Medhi Daoudi and VP of Operations Tony Ferrelli. Medhi's recent blog post  Monitoring at the Edge of the Third Act of the Intern...

It's another case study episode of the pod. Today, we welcome Ian Calderbank, Enterprise Network Architect at PageGroup, to the hot seat. In his conversation with Greg, Ian details the network transformation process for a multinational staffing agency. An environment packed with knowledge workers and downtown office space sounds like an enviable position to be in as a WAN manager, right? But there...

In this episode, we dig into sourcing. Our listeners know that we often discuss the migration of large enterprises away from one or two global suppliers for a mostly MPLS network to a novel mix of transport types and suppliers. This is especially true due to changing trends in cloud migration, SD-WAN, and security. May it be local internet breakouts from a variety of ISPs alongside MPLS or sourcin...

Our data shows that a majority of enterprises have more than one IaaS provider. For SaaS, that number can be dozens, hundreds, even more. And most have moved the majority of their data centers off corporate premises to some kind of shared facility. This means most companies are dealing with multi-cloud connectivity in some shape or form; WAN managers of course have to handle that from a performanc...