The global telecoms market research firm released its 2021 WAN Manager Survey which shows a clear downtrend in MPLS use from a high of 82% of sites running the product in 2018 down to 46% in 2021.
This is the first time that the figure has dropped below half of average sites, TeleGeography says.
DIA, meanwhile, experienced a four-year CAGR increase of 3% and broadband logging an increase of 1.5%.
The report indicates that the extension of Covid-related remote work has accelerated ongoing WAN trends like migration to the cloud, SD-WAN adoption and incorporation of alternative access technology in the underlay.
“Through our survey, we can see that enterprise companies are embracing hybrid networks more and more,” said Elizabeth Thorne, senior analyst at TeleGeography.
“MPLS usage in our respondents’ WAN has been declining steadily, and in 2021 we saw a near-equal ratio of MPLS and DIA in the average network. Given these rates, we’ll have an eye on DIA usage to perhaps overtake MPLS in future surveys.”
TeleGeography’s WAN Manager Survey features analysis based on the experiences of WAN managers from 185 companies with a median revenue of $10 billion. The 2021 report focuses on IT manager and includes 60 new responses across various industries.
The research also revealed that ZTS adoption is on the rise, growing from 8% of respondents in 2019 to 35% in 2021.
