TeleGeography Explains the Internet

This week, we're talking about NaaS. We've covered NaaS in various contexts on TeleGeography Explains the Internet, but this episode focuses on fabric providers and where they're headed. For that, we're so glad to have on our outspoken and knowledgeable friend Michael Wynston, Director of Network Security Architecture & Automation at Fiserv. Michael has now been on TeleGeography's podcast not once, not twice, but three times—and it's safe to say that he really knows his stuff. What are...

If you want to review the state of the corporate WAN—in light of digital transformation, the cloud, SD-WAN adoption, and MPLS utilization—there's no one better to talk to than Phil Gervasi, Director of Technical Evangelism at Kentik. Lucky for us, he was this week's guest on TeleGeography Explains the Internet. We covered the state of lift-and-shift into the cloud, the perseverance of MPLS, real use cases of SD-WAN, and, of course, lots on how network changes have impacted the...

Let's do it. Let's talk satellites! And we have the perfect person to help us out. We're thrilled to welcome Dr. Peter Wood—TeleGeography analyst and resident satellite guy—to the pod. We discuss how—while wires still reign supreme—satellite is having a bit of a resurgence. And maybe even the potential to disrupt the wireline market? Listen to our conversation to find out. It was also a great opportunity to get Alan Mauldin on the line to talk more about his latest blog post, which is all...

Our guest today is Waheed Adam, Global Board Director of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum and Executive Chairperson at iTouch Messaging Service. He was a fantastic guest who brought a wealth of knowledge—and some really excellent stories—about mobile adoption as infrastructure in Africa. Senior Research Manager Patrick Christian joined in to discuss mobile-first economies, the role of hyperscalers/data centers in Africa, and the future of African telecoms. From this Episode: 2022 Africa...

When we reached out to today's podcast guest—Jim Poole, Vice President of Business Development at Equinix—about being on the show, we asked if he'd be willing to dig into NaaS or edge data centers. But as we got to talking before our interview, we realized that these two topics are deeply interrelated. And Jim has lots of insight to share about where the market is headed. We waded through how Equinix is approaching NaaS from a solutions standpoint and what it means to truly be an edge data...

To kick off Season 4, we're going deep into the supply chain as Greg welcomes Dr. Michael Lebby, CEO of Lightwave Logic. The pair get into making a better mousetrap for the light-switching world. Listen up if you're into the technology that makes optical transport possible—and specifically how this technology fits into the telecom transport ecosystem. Fasten your seatbelts. This episode has new tech talk, optical transport pricing intel, a big Shannon Limit shout-out, and lots more.

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 a backup of last resort for many users, but 5G has presented the promise of relieving this...

While NaaS and the middle mile are fairly new concepts, they're not new to the WAN Manager 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. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll ponder the post-MPLS SD-WAN network and the future of the WAN business. From This...

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, more often than not, benchmarking is much more complicated these days. Enterprises often have...

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. At the WAN Manager Podcast, 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 cut through in terms of how vendors present their services to the...

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 WAN Manager Podcast. From This Episode E-book: Learn how to secure the WAN with SASEManaged SASE services: Does one size fit all?The Home Office Isn't Going Away. What Does That...

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 WAN Manager Podcast 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 Health, shares his network story in our latest WAN Manager Pod. Greg and Carl talk...

We've discussed the ways in which the WAN is moving away from private networks and MPLS in favor of reliance on the public internet. Not to mention the costs and benefits of that evolution. Although it's certainly always been the case that WAN managers must stay on top of internet performance and outages, this is increasingly crucial in the internet-first WAN era in which we find ourselves. To get into the ways in which global events, natural or human, impact the internet—and how to stay...

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: how to manage the middle mile. Almost a year on from that conversation, Greg and Ciaran delve...

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. More than ever, enterprises need to understand the market landscape and pricing structure at...

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 accommodating a remote-friendly, bring-your-own-device, work-from-anywhere environment. Many...

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 represents fewer than one in ten sites, on average. That said, we might expect to see that increase...

Network automation pops up often on the WAN Manager Podcast. 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. To get into it, Greg welcomes Michael Martin, Senior Expert of Networking and Network Security at McKinsey & Co. The pair covers the basics of network automation, getting engineers/network architects up to speed in this area, and attracting the right new talent for...

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 providers. We also found that the majority of enterprises were in hybrid cloud situations, with some...