SD-WAN isn’t “faster MPLS.” It’s a different way of thinking about WAN.

Traditional WAN was built for a world where:
• Apps lived in the data center
• MPLS was king
• All traffic hair-pinned back to HQ

That world is gone.

What SD-WAN really changes:
• Uses any transport — MPLS, broadband, LTE/5G
• Builds a secure overlay on top of unreliable underlays
• Routes traffic based on application intent, not just IP routes
• Eliminates the “trombone effect” with direct internet access
• Enables zero-touch provisioning for rapid branch rollout

Video calls don’t care about cost.
Backups don’t care about latency.
SaaS doesn’t belong on MPLS.

SD-WAN understands this — traditional routing doesn’t.

If your WAN design still treats all packets equally, your users are paying the price in latency, jitter, and frustration.

This diagram gets it right:
SD-WAN = transport-agnostic + application-aware + policy-driven networking.