Sixteen sites.
£186k a year.
Cut to
£28k.
A 5-country manufacturing group was paying £186k/year for a legacy MPLS network: a private leased-line network connecting their factories. Nobody had challenged the cost in years. The sites in France, Poland, India, and China were all paying premium rates for connectivity that could be replaced.
Relevant if: you’re paying monthly for connectivity or infrastructure that hasn’t been challenged in years.
Diagram showing connectivity cost reduction from £186,000 per year on legacy MPLS to £28,000 per year on Ubiquiti SD-WAN across 16 manufacturing sites in 5 countries, an 85% cut.
Legacy lines.
Premium prices.
“The MPLS was still running. Still billing. Nobody had asked whether it was still needed because it had always been there.”
The group had inherited an MPLS network: the kind of dedicated private network that made sense a decade ago when internet bandwidth was unreliable. By the time the audit happened, every site had reliable broadband. The MPLS was still running. Still billing. Nobody had asked whether it was still needed because it had always been there.
£186k/year across 16 sites. Factories in France, Poland, India, and China all on premium leased-line contracts. The cost had never been challenged because the network was never broken. “It works” and “it’s the right choice” are different questions, but nobody was asking the second one.
Map it.
Cost it. Replace it.
The engagement started with a full connectivity audit across all 16 sites: every contract, every circuit, bandwidth usage, and cost per site. That produced the complete picture that nobody had assembled before.
The case for SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area networking, which routes traffic over standard broadband instead of dedicated leased lines) was built as a formal business case with CEO sponsorship. Ubiquiti hardware was specified per site based on the bandwidth requirements uncovered in the audit.
Deployment was planned factory by factory so no site went dark during the cutover. Each location ran the new SD-WAN in parallel before the MPLS circuit was decommissioned. UK sites went first, then the rollout extended to France, Poland, India, and China.
Full inventory
of 16 sites
Complete inventory across all 16 sites: current contracts, bandwidth usage, and cost per site. The audit built the business case and identified the savings available before a single piece of hardware was ordered.
Ubiquiti SD-WAN
per site
Ubiquiti SD-WAN equipment specified and procured for each of the 16 sites based on bandwidth requirements from the audit. Hardware chosen for its price point and the group’s existing familiarity with the platform.
Site by site.
Zero downtime.
Site-by-site cutover with zero-downtime targets. UK sites first, then France, Poland, India, and China. Each location ran the SD-WAN in parallel before the MPLS circuit was decommissioned, with no business disruption at any stage.
Legacy costs survive
because nobody asks.
The MPLS network wasn’t broken. It worked fine. That’s why nobody questioned it. But “it works” and “it’s the right choice” are different questions. Legacy infrastructure costs compound because they’re invisible: they’ve always been on the budget, so they stay on the budget.
The audit asks the question nobody else is asking: “is this still the right way to do this?” In this case the answer was clearly no. The technology had moved on, the price differential was enormous, and the migration was straightforward once the decision was made. The barrier wasn’t technical. It was the absence of someone whose job it was to ask.
Questions raised.
- My business only has one site. Is this relevant?
- The principle is the same. If you’re paying monthly for connectivity, hosting, or infrastructure that’s never been reviewed, there’s often a cheaper way. The triage conversation costs nothing and takes 15 minutes.
- What’s SD-WAN in plain English?
- It’s software that routes your network traffic over standard broadband instead of expensive private leased lines. You get the same reliability for a fraction of the cost. The hardware (Ubiquiti in this case) sits at each site and manages the routing.
- Did any sites experience downtime during the migration?
- No. Each site was cut over individually with the new SD-WAN running in parallel before the MPLS circuit was decommissioned. Zero business disruption was a hard requirement, not a target.
- Could this work with hardware other than Ubiquiti?
- Yes. Ubiquiti was the right choice here because of the price point and the group’s existing familiarity. Other SD-WAN platforms (Cisco Meraki, Fortinet) work the same way at different price points. The hardware choice gets made during the audit, not before it.
Got a similar mess?
Let’s talk.
If you’re paying for connectivity or infrastructure that hasn’t been reviewed in years, the 15-minute triage is the right first step. Free, no pitch, honest answer on whether an audit makes sense.