What exactly does Amplifier One do?

Amplifier One is an independent IT and telecom advisory firm. We help businesses find, evaluate, and negotiate technology solutions — from internet connectivity and cloud infrastructure to cybersecurity, UCaaS, and managed services. We are a buyer's agent for technology. We're not a reseller, and we don't manufacture or white-label any products. Our founder built infrastructure and technology teams at companies including Slack, Lookout, Deloitte, and Mosaic Networx.

How is Amplifier One different from a regular IT consultant or VAR?

Most VARs and IT consultants make their money by marking up hardware or software, or by steering you toward products they're certified to sell. Their inventory defines your options. As a vendor-neutral advisor and telecom agent, we have access to 200+ carriers, managed service providers, cloud platforms, and IT vendors — and we have no obligation to recommend any specific one. VARs earn margin by selling products at a markup. We earn supplier-paid commissions that don't inflate your price.

Do you replace our internal IT team or existing MSP?

No. Amplifier One is an advisor, not an operator. We don't replace your internal IT team or take over day-to-day support responsibilities. We complement whoever is managing your environment by helping with the vendor and procurement side. If you have an IT Director or CIO, we work alongside them. If you already have an MSP you're happy with, we can still help you optimize your telecom contracts, evaluate cloud options, or negotiate renewals.

What does a typical engagement look like from start to finish?

Every engagement starts with a discovery conversation — usually 30 to 45 minutes — where we learn about your environment, goals, and pain points. From there we audit your existing contracts, conduct a Technology Strategy Session, identify gaps and renewal risk, issue RFPs across relevant suppliers, present a side-by-side comparison with our recommendation, negotiate terms on your behalf, and support implementation.

Where do you operate? Are you local?

We're based in San Luis Obispo, California, and serve businesses throughout California, Arizona, and Nevada. That regional focus matters — we know the local carrier landscape, availability maps, regulatory quirks, and the vendors that actually perform in your market. Many of the services we advise on (cloud, security, UCaaS) are national or global platforms, so we can also support businesses with offices in other states.

Who at Amplifier One would I actually be working with?

Directly with our founder and leadership — not a junior associate or an account coordinator who hands you off after the sale. We're a boutique firm and that's intentional. Our founder brings hands-on IT infrastructure experience from Slack, Lookout, Deloitte, and Mosaic Networx.

What does working with Amplifier One cost?

In most cases, nothing. Our advisory services are compensated through supplier-paid commissions — the same model used by mortgage brokers and insurance agents. You get professional guidance, negotiation leverage, and ongoing support at no out-of-pocket cost. For certain specialized consulting projects, we may discuss project-based fees, but we're transparent about that upfront.

How does the supplier commission model work? Does it influence your recommendations?

When you purchase technology through our advisory process, suppliers in our network pay us a commission. This commission is built into the supplier's standard pricing structure — not added on top of what you pay. Our recommendation is based on fit, not commission rate. Some of the vendors we recommend most often pay lower commissions than alternatives we've passed on.

Will I pay more by going through Amplifier One versus buying directly from the vendor?

You won't. Supplier commissions in the telecom and IT advisory world are paid out of the supplier's distribution budget — not added to your invoice. In practice, most clients pay less than the published rate because of the negotiating leverage we bring. Carriers and vendors know we represent multiple clients across a region and price accordingly.

What happens to your relationship with us if we switch vendors or cancel a service later?

If you cancel a service or switch vendors, the commission on that contract ends — and we're fine with that if it's the right move for your business. We're not going to lock you into a bad vendor to protect our commission. That's the whole point of being vendor-neutral.

What does vendor-neutral actually mean in practice?

We don't have preferred vendors. We're not a Cisco partner or Microsoft reseller or carrier's preferred agent. We have relationships with 200+ suppliers but no contractual obligation to recommend any of them — and no financial incentive to favor one over another based on commission rate. When you ask about connectivity in Phoenix, we'll show you AT&T, Lumen, Cox, Zayo, and others — and recommend the one that fits your requirements.

Can you work with vendors we already have relationships with, or do we have to switch?

We don't require you to change vendors to work with us. If you're already with a carrier, MSP, or SaaS provider you're happy with, we can work with that relationship — helping you optimize pricing, prepare for renewals, or negotiate better terms with your existing suppliers. Sometimes the best recommendation is to stay where you are and renegotiate.

Do you have preferred carriers or cloud providers you push?

We have vendors we've seen perform well for specific use cases — and that experience informs our recommendations. But preferred in our world means performs well for clients like you, not pays us better. We won't recommend a carrier with a poor service record in your area just because the commission is higher.

How do I know you're really giving me independent advice and not steering me?

Ask hard questions about how we get paid and what limits our recommendations. Ask us to show you the full market for any category, and we will. Ask us to explain why we recommended one vendor over another, and we'll show our work. You'll know we're giving you straight advice when our recommendations occasionally say stay where you are or this is a problem we can't solve better than what you already have.

How do I get started? Is there a commitment required?

Reach out through our contact page, by email, or by phone, and we'll schedule a 30 to 45 minute discovery call. No commitment, no pitch deck, no pressure. If there's a clear way we can help, we'll outline what that looks like. If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you that too.

What information do I need to have ready before our first conversation?

Nothing formal is required. Useful things to have handy: a general sense of your current IT and telecom monthly spend, which vendors or carriers you're currently using, renewal dates for your biggest contracts if you know them, and the problem you're most urgently trying to solve. If you don't have all of that, part of what we do is help you figure it out.

How long before I see actual results?

It depends on scope. For a focused project like renegotiating a carrier contract or finding a better UCaaS option, you can see a recommendation within 30 to 60 days. For broader engagements like a full technology audit, the timeline is 60 to 120 days from kickoff to implementation. We prefer to get involved 90 to 180 days ahead of a renewal to have real leverage.

Can you help with a single specific problem, or do I need to engage you for my whole environment?

You can bring us in for a single problem. If you're trying to renegotiate one contract, evaluate one vendor, or solve one connectivity issue, we're happy to engage at that scope. We don't require a broad retainer or minimum commitment to get started.

What if we're already mid-contract with a vendor we want to change?

Mid-contract situations are common and very workable. We evaluate options including renegotiating the existing contract while you're in it, reviewing early termination clauses, calculating the true cost of staying versus switching including ETF exposure, and beginning planning so you're positioned to move decisively at expiration. Difficult contracts can sometimes be restructured, transferred, or bought out.

What types of technology do you help with?

Connectivity and SD-WAN (business internet, MPLS, fiber, dedicated circuits), cloud and infrastructure (IaaS, DRaaS, colocation, migration strategy), AV and UCaaS (cloud phone, video conferencing, Teams voice), cybersecurity (SASE, endpoint, identity, email security, MDR), managed services advisor work, AI and automation, and full-stack renewals management.

Do you sell or resell hardware?

Generally, no. We focus on services — connectivity, cloud, software, and managed services. We don't sell or stock hardware, and we don't markup equipment. If hardware is part of a solution, that typically comes through the service provider as part of their managed offering.

Can you help with cybersecurity even if we already have a security vendor or MSSP?

Yes. We frequently work with clients who have existing security vendors but aren't sure they're getting full value, or who are approaching a renewal and want an independent read before they sign again. We can evaluate whether your security posture matches your risk profile, whether you're paying market rates, and whether there are gaps in your coverage.

Do you help with cloud migration specifically, or just procurement?

We help with cloud strategy, platform selection, and vendor negotiation. For hands-on migration execution — actually moving workloads, refactoring applications, writing infrastructure-as-code — you'd typically need a cloud professional services firm or an MSP with that technical capability. We help define requirements, evaluate AWS vs. Azure vs. GCP vs. private cloud objectively, and select the right partner to execute.

Can you help multi-location businesses, or only single-site companies?

Multi-location businesses are often where we add the most value. The complexity of managing connectivity, voice, and security across multiple sites creates significant opportunities for consolidation, standardization, and savings. We have deep experience with retail chains, professional services with branch offices, healthcare groups with distributed locations, and manufacturing companies with plants across the country.

What size company does Amplifier One typically work with?

We work best with small-to-mid-market businesses — roughly 15 to 1,500 employees — that have meaningful technology spend but don't have a dedicated procurement or vendor management function. Very small businesses with minimal technology may not have enough complexity to benefit from our advisory model. The sweet spot is companies with real technology spend and meaningful vendor relationships.

What industries does Amplifier One focus on?

We don't limit ourselves to one vertical, but we have significant experience with healthcare and medical groups (HIPAA-compliant infrastructure), professional services (law firms, accounting, consulting, financial services), retail and hospitality (multi-location connectivity), manufacturing and logistics (operational technology, hybrid WAN), fast-growing technology companies, and real estate and property management.

What if we're a startup or early-stage company with a limited budget?

Early-stage companies are a great fit for some of what we do — particularly around connectivity, cloud infrastructure, and UCaaS where getting the right foundation matters and getting it wrong is expensive to unwind. Since our advisory model has no out-of-pocket cost in most cases, budget isn't a barrier to getting started.

We already have a good relationship with our current vendors. Why would we want an advisor involved?

A good vendor relationship is valuable, and we wouldn't suggest disrupting something that's working. But there's a difference between a relationship and optimal terms. Vendors are friendly to clients they like — and they're also in the business of maximizing their own margins at renewal time. Having an independent advisor doesn't disrupt your vendor relationships; it makes sure you have market context, someone reviewing the contract language, and an advocate who isn't paid by the vendor.

What is a buyer's agent for technology?

A buyer's agent for technology represents the buyer in the purchase process — not the vendor. Just as a real estate buyer's agent works to find the right home for the buyer at the best terms (paid by the seller's commission), a technology buyer's agent like Amplifier One evaluates options across the full market, negotiates on the buyer's behalf, and is compensated by the supplier rather than the buyer.

SD-WAN vs MPLS in 2026: Future of Networking

If you run more than one location, the network connecting your sites to each other, to the cloud, and to the internet is one of the largest and least-scrutinized lines on your technology budget. For two decades the safe answer was MPLS. In 2026, for most businesses, it isn't.

MPLS — a private, carrier-managed network — worked, and it was expensive. Then SD-WAN arrived: software that turns ordinary internet connections into a smart, self-healing network, and the math started to change. Today the question isn't "is SD-WAN ready?" It's "is there still a reason to pay for MPLS?"

This is the plain-English version: what each one actually is, what they really cost once you add everything up, where each still wins, and how to decide. No acronym left unexplained.

The Real Risk

The expensive mistake is the autopilot renewal

The costliest WAN decision usually isn't MPLS versus SD-WAN — it's re-signing a multi-year contract for whatever you have now, without checking, because the renewal notice arrived. Both are bought on multi-year terms. The time to evaluate is before that notice, not after.

The short answer

For most small and mid-market businesses in 2026, SD-WAN is the better default — lower cost per megabit, faster to deploy, far more flexible, and increasingly bundled with the security you need anyway. MPLS still earns its place in specific situations, which we'll get to. But it's no longer the automatic choice it was five years ago.

MPLS isn't obsolete. It's just rarely the right default anymore.

What each one actually is

MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) is a private network service you buy from a single carrier. The carrier dedicates a managed path between your locations and guarantees how it performs — low delay, low packet loss, prioritized voice. You're renting a private highway between your sites.

SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area network) takes a different approach. Instead of one private circuit, you use ordinary internet links — business fiber, cable broadband, even cellular — and put a smart layer on top that decides, moment to moment, which link to send each application over. If a link degrades or drops, it reroutes instantly. You're using public roads, but with a very smart navigation system steering around every jam.

What SD-WAN Actually Does

Your Links

Fiber · Cable · LTE

→

SD-WAN Edge

Picks the best path, fails over instantly

→

Destinations

Sites · Cloud · SaaS

MPLS gives you one guaranteed road. SD-WAN gives you several ordinary roads — and the brains to use them well.

SASE (secure access service edge) is where SD-WAN is heading: the same smart networking, with cloud-delivered security folded in. More on that below — it's the part that tips a lot of 2026 decisions.

The real cost math

Sticker price is where MPLS loses most often, but the honest comparison is total cost across a few dimensions, not just the monthly circuit bill.

	MPLS	SD-WAN
How it connects	One private circuit, managed by a single carrier	Multiple ordinary internet links, managed by software
Cost per megabit	High — often several times the price of broadband	Low — rides commodity broadband and fiber
New-site install	Weeks to months to provision	Days — turns up over existing internet
Bandwidth flexibility	Fixed; changes are slow and costly	Scale up or down quickly, per site
Performance guarantee	Yes — contractual SLA, traffic prioritized	No per-link guarantee; steers to the best path in real time
Built-in security	None — added separately	Yes, in its SASE form — security folded in
Cloud & SaaS fit	Backhauls through a private core	Direct-to-cloud, optimized per app
Best fit	Latency-critical, fixed site-to-site, thin-broadband locations	Most multi-site SMBs; cloud-first, distributed teams

The headline: MPLS typically costs several times more per megabit than broadband, and standing up a new site can take weeks or months. SD-WAN rides commodity internet that's cheaper and faster to turn up — the trade is that you're swapping a contractual performance guarantee for intelligent management of links that individually carry no guarantee.

Performance, reliability & QoS

MPLS's whole value proposition is the guarantee. The carrier commits to delay, jitter, and packet-loss targets in a service-level agreement (SLA) and prioritizes real-time traffic like voice and video — a capability called quality of service, or QoS. For a hospital running live telemetry or a trading desk, that contractual certainty can be worth paying for.

SD-WAN guarantees no single link — but it watches all of them continuously and steers each application to the path performing best right now, failing over in milliseconds when one degrades. For most business traffic — cloud apps, internet phone service, file sync, web — real-time path selection across two or three links delivers reliability that rivals or beats a single MPLS circuit, because a single circuit has no backup on the day it has a bad one.

Security and the SASE shift

Here's the part that tips many 2026 decisions: MPLS carries your traffic but secures none of it — you bolt security on separately. SD-WAN, especially in its SASE form, folds security into the network itself: a cloud security layer that inspects traffic, enforces policy, and protects users wherever they work, including at home.

As teams stay distributed and applications live in the cloud, routing everything back through a private core to a central firewall — the old "hub and spoke" model — is slow and expensive. SASE sends traffic straight to the cloud, secured along the way. For a growing business, that convergence of connectivity and security into one platform is often the real reason to move, more than the bandwidth savings.

When MPLS still makes sense

To be fair to MPLS, it still wins in specific cases:

Latency-critical, real-time workloads where a contractual SLA is non-negotiable — some healthcare, financial, and industrial-control environments.
Sites with poor or single-source broadband, where the reliable internet links SD-WAN depends on simply aren't available.
Heavy site-to-site traffic between fixed locations rather than to the cloud, where a private core is efficient.
Organizations mid-contract where an early-termination penalty outweighs near-term savings.

Often the answer isn't all-or-nothing. A hybrid — MPLS at the one or two sites that genuinely need it, SD-WAN everywhere else — captures most of the savings without the risk.

How to decide

Four questions cut through most of it:

What's actually on the network? Map your traffic — how much goes to the cloud and SaaS versus between your own sites.
What does each site's internet look like? Strong fiber and broadband favor SD-WAN; thin options may call for MPLS or a hybrid.
When do your current contracts renew? That sets both your timeline and your leverage.
Is a security refresh also due? If so, SASE may solve two problems with one move.

Where a vendor-neutral advisor fits

One clarification, because it's the common confusion: Amplifier One is not an MSP, and not a reseller. We don't run your help desk, we don't sell you hardware, and you never get an invoice from us. We act as your buyer's agent for technology.

On a WAN decision, that means we model the real cost and performance of MPLS, SD-WAN, and SASE across your actual sites, run the options across the whole market — not one vendor's box — and design the hybrid if that's the right answer. Because the vendors pay us a commission when you choose them, the advisory work costs you nothing and isn't tied to any one product. And because the founder came up running IT infrastructure rather than selling circuits, the read is grounded in operating these networks, not quota.

SD-WAN vs MPLS FAQs

Q1Is MPLS dead?

No, but it's become a specialist tool rather than the default. Most new multi-site deployments now choose SD-WAN or SASE, while MPLS persists where guaranteed performance SLAs or limited broadband make it necessary.

Q2Is SD-WAN actually cheaper than MPLS?

Usually yes on bandwidth — broadband and fiber cost a fraction of MPLS per megabit. The larger savings often come from faster deployment, flexible scaling, and folding security into the same platform. The exact result depends on your site count and the internet available at each one.

Q3Is SD-WAN secure, and what is SASE?

SD-WAN by itself is networking; security is added on top. SASE is SD-WAN combined with cloud-delivered security in one platform. For most businesses moving off MPLS, SASE is the version worth evaluating, because it solves connectivity and security together.

Q4Can I run SD-WAN over my existing internet?

Generally yes — that's the point. It typically uses two or more internet links, such as fiber plus cable or fiber plus cellular backup, so no single outage takes a site down. The quality and redundancy of those links is what matters most.

Q5Do I have to replace everything at once?

No. Most rollouts are phased and often run as a hybrid — keeping MPLS only where it's genuinely needed and timing the transition to contract renewals so you avoid early-termination penalties.

The bottom line

The 2026 reality is simple: for most small and mid-market businesses, SD-WAN — increasingly as SASE — is the better default, while MPLS has narrowed to the specific cases where a guaranteed private circuit is genuinely required. The expensive mistake isn't picking one or the other; it's renewing whatever you have without running the numbers.

Start by mapping where your traffic actually goes and when your contracts renew. The right answer falls out of those two facts faster than any vendor pitch.

The Easy Next Step

Not sure which way your network should go?

We'll model the real cost and performance of MPLS, SD-WAN, and SASE across your sites — vendor-neutral, at no cost. The same look we'd give a client.

Book a free audit → Subscribe to The Signal

About the Author

Justin Wilson, Founder of Amplifier One

Most technology advisors grew up in telecom. Justin Wilson grew up in IT — building infrastructure at some of the most demanding companies in the world, including Slack, Lookout, and Deloitte, before spending years in enterprise consulting and the telecom channel. Amplifier One is the firm he built because the advisor he wished existed when he was the buyer didn't.