What is MPLS?
Multiprotocol Label Switching
A WAN transport technology that routes traffic using short path labels rather than IP addresses, providing predictable latency and guaranteed bandwidth through provider-managed circuits.
MPLS is the legacy WAN transport that SD-WAN was designed to augment or replace. It works by assigning labels to packets at the provider edge, which are then used to forward traffic along predetermined label-switched paths (LSPs) through the provider's backbone. Because paths are pre-provisioned and bandwidth is guaranteed through traffic engineering, MPLS delivers consistent latency and low jitter, which is why it has been the standard for voice and video traffic for decades.
The drawbacks are cost, rigidity, and cloud incompatibility. MPLS circuits are significantly more expensive per megabit than broadband internet. Provisioning a new site takes weeks to months. And because MPLS routes traffic through a hub-and-spoke topology to a centralized data center, cloud and SaaS traffic suffers from the latency of backhauling to the hub before reaching the internet.
Most organizations are not ripping out MPLS entirely. The common migration pattern is to add broadband or LTE/5G links alongside MPLS, use SD-WAN to load-balance and fail over between them, and gradually reduce MPLS circuit bandwidth as confidence in the overlay grows. Critical sites with latency-sensitive applications may retain MPLS as one of several transports managed by the SD-WAN fabric.
A virtualized WAN architecture that abstracts transport links (MPLS, broadband, LTE/5G) and uses software-based policy to select the optimal path for each application.
A cloud-delivered architecture that converges SD-WAN and security services (SWG, CASB, ZTNA, FWaaS) into a single, globally distributed platform.
A geographically distributed data center operated by a SASE/SSE provider where security inspection and traffic optimization occur as close to the user as possible.
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