About the Author

My name is Curt Burnside, I am The Telecom Broker.

As a 25 year telecom veteran, I have designed, sold, provisioned and serviced dozens of VPN, Frame Relay, MPLS and SD-WAN networks. I have had a private Telecom Brokerage practice for most of my career. My start was at BellSouth where I was trained in ILEC dial tone, data transport, e-Commerce and inter-working via carrier level training, internet industry and Cisco certifications. I have more than a passing understanding of how carriers (vendors) work, provision service, handle (or don't) tactical pricing processes (negotiating best price) and WAN design considerations.

I also have expertise in vendor selection and a firm understanding of Customer Premise Equipment (CPE)  It used to be I stopped at the WAN port, but with the advent of managed router, managed security service and SD-WAN, telco vendors are increasingly handling it all, up to and including network based security (HA cloud based firewalls, primary and DR data centers, DDoS mitigation, etc) 

What I'm seeing increasingly, as threat landscapes have grown, is many IT departments find themselves struggling to cope. The expense of a breach is way expensive, and must be avoided at all costs. 

For this reason best practices increasingly lean towards both CPE and security services be provisioned and managed by a single vendor (an SD-WAN telco as the managed security provider), not the customer.  Cyber security mandates are driving many network designs and hence purchases to fully managed service.  Using a managed security provider is a logical cost effective way to secure the network perimeter without sacrificing network and internet performance.

Customers then enjoy the vendors economies of scale for expertise and pricing as well as "one throat to choke" and a lot less moving parts for customer management and responsibility.  This allows IT to focus on their core competencies, not having to learn and certify on a bunch of stuff someone else can handle at a much lower cost.  An MSP is another option ie: a hybrid network, and I do address some of this in section 4, the design section.

Due to this issue, vendor selection and expertise becomes even more important, as the vendor must not only be a telco, with a robust IP backbone and adequate at provisioning network access and CPE at each node, but also security and hardware experts to assure customers are protected. Finding these animals are my specialty.

This website SD-WAN Guru.com provides a comprehensive basic overview of key SD-WAN product service areas to guide your evaluation, selection and network design parameters.  It is designed for the basic IT guy or gal, including decision makers and decision influencers. 

Of course it's my hope that should you desire assistance in evaluating your business needs, and perhaps securing proposals, you'll think of my company. I handle many classes of service, from circuits to UCaaS, not just SD-WAN.  Contact me anytime to discuss your current project, for ideas or a second opinion.

It's my plan to continue to add to this website, but it will take a while.  By the time I get done providing links to new pages under the main headings on the five main pages, I'll probably be concurrently updating the content as well to keep it current.  So please have patience. The site was started in 4Q 2024, and should be well fleshed out by the end of 2025.

Thanks for dropping by, I hope you find value here.

- Curt Burnside

The Telecom Broker

Click to call if you like.