Around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, on the expo floor of a conference I recently attended, the staff rolled out a pair of coffee urns. One was labeled “Coffee.” The other was labeled “Fresh Brewed Coffee.”
I tasted both and they were identical. Clearly, this conference center did not have a standards guide for how to label their coffee urns.
I laughed, but the labels stuck with me. It brought me back to the early days of my career when I was responsible for authoring telecommunication standards at Bellcore (aka Telcordia, now part of Ericsson). Standards are what bring clarity, compatibility and consistency to systems that would otherwise drift into chaos. True progress can only happen with the guiding force of standards.
Compatibility was the foundation
The telecommunications industry has always advanced on the strength of standardization. From the earliest days of the telephone network to today’s global digital infrastructure, compatibility has been the foundation that allows communication across carriers, technologies and geographies.
Yet for the first time in decades, we are entering an era where the access technologies powering enterprise connectivity — fiber broadband, LTE and 5G, Starlink and other low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems, legacy Ethernet and more — do not share a common physical or transport-layer standard.
Each operates differently. None are inherently compatible. Yet, enterprises are expected to combine them into a seamless, secure wide-area network (WAN).
This incompatibility is precisely why internet-based WANs are becoming inevitable. The only universal point where all these diverse transports can meet is at the IP layer. Regardless of whether data starts on a fiber modem, a 5G radio tower or a satellite thousands of miles above the Earth, every one of these technologies ultimately resolves to IP, the shared digital language underneath everything.
This dynamic is not new. In the early 1900’s, when Bell’s patent expired, nascent carriers built isolated, incompatible systems. Only after waves of standardization — accelerated by milestones like the 1984 divestiture — did we have true cross-carrier interoperability. For example, some using MCI (remember MCI?) could call someone on Sprint without friction. Data networking followed the same path.
Early enterprise environments like SNA, X.25 and Frame Relay; and consumer environments like AOL and Prodigy existed as disconnected ecosystems. IP became the breakthrough that unified them all. It created the “meet-me point” where previously incompatible networks could finally interoperate.
Repeating the pattern
Today’s access diversity is repeating this historical pattern. Broadband operates on different standards such as DOCSIS and 3GPP. Starlink relies on a completely different RF transmission standard and routing architecture. Their only shared layer is IP, making the internet the natural meeting place for them all.
For organizations reluctant to embrace internet-based WANs, the two major objections — security and reliability — deserve clear answers.
IPSec tunnels, encrypted SD-WAN overlays, identity-based access and mature secure access service edge frameworks have been deployed at massive global scale for more than a decade. These protections are overtaking MPLS as the new standard of secure networking, not the exception.
Reliability concerns are equally outdated. Critics often point to the lack of QoS on the internet or imagine scenarios where global congestion disrupts enterprise connectivity. Yet, we witnessed the ultimate real-world stress test in March 2020, when billions of workers simultaneously shifted from office networks to home internet connections during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Despite an unprecedented surge in global traffic, the internet never collapsed. There was no headline declaring that the world’s connectivity failed.
The distributed design and immense capacity of the global internet proved robust enough to handle the weight of an entire planet suddenly working from home. Enterprise WANs did not grind to a halt, and the core internet demonstrated a level of capacity and resilience that private networks could never match.
But perhaps the most important reason internet-based WANs are inevitable has nothing to do with compatibility or security and everything to do with investment. The telecommunications industry is pouring its capital into broadband expansion, 5G infrastructure, LEO satellite networks, cloud routing and edge compute.
No new investment is flowing into MPLS or traditional private WAN architectures.
False sense of confidence
In conversations with CIOs and network leaders, a recurring pattern emerges: they recognize a shift in technology but retain a false sense of confidence in the systems like MPLS that they have relied on for over two decades.
Every trend line points toward a future built on internet-based connectivity. Organizations that resist this shift risk missing out on the most significant wave of network innovation since the birth of fiber optics.
The future of connectivity lies in a world where diverse transports meet seamlessly at the IP layer, where SD-WAN orchestrates performance and security, and where the vast investment behind public internet technologies becomes a strategic asset for every organization.
In time, this transition will appear obvious and the days of closed proprietary networks will be a distant memory. Enterprises that embrace the shift now will benefit from unprecedented flexibility, access to next-generation technologies and a future-proof network capable of evolving with whatever innovations emerge next.
Those that resist will find themselves increasingly isolated, tied to architectures that the telecom industry itself has already left behind.
Internet-based WANs are not merely the next step in network evolution. They are the inevitable destination.
As for the conference center serving up coffee non-standard signs, they did one thing right and standardized on what they were brewing.
Don Parente is VP of MetTel’s Public Sector, where he is responsible for direct sales and solution architecture for U.S. federal agencies, states, local and education customers. Previously, he held leadership roles at AT&T, serving across commercial and government segments, with increasing responsibility in the areas of solution architecture, marketing, product management, sales engineering and sales.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.