With increasing pressure to sweat assets and drive efficiencies, is the reign of the MPLS coming to an end?
Certainly the networks would like to continue providing their MPLS for you. It is a huge revenue stream for them, but these same network providers have been convincing you to move all your services to the Cloud, so what do we need our MPLS network for?
The answer is: Voice, Video, (Critical) time sensitive Applications. We are moving into a world where Cloud applications will be the bulk of services we use. Voice and Video over the Internet can be challenging and using Skype can still be far from perfect over the Internet.
There are now however policies and codecs which exist claiming they have resolved the quality issues with voice/video over the Internet. Products such as the Opus codec (https://www.opus-codec.org/) claims to have superior quality over internet traffic.
However, and this is the problem, while I.T staff, technicians and consumers at home calling their auntie in Australia put up with bad quality and interrupted calls while using voice over the Internet, it is simply just not acceptable to the majority of staff and why should it be. We've had good quality voice for over 100 years and then I.T. put a new network in place where calls drop and quality is poor and they tell staff it's better because it goes over the internet. It doesn't make sense.
So although we have no doubt that we will all be using the internet to make calls in the relatively near future, as of today, for real-time applications such as video and voice we would advise to proceed with caution when looking to get rid of your MPLS network.