Help! I need connectivity in Angola.
I wrote a little about this a few weeks ago, but an update is due. The client contacted us because their AT&T rep said they couldn’t help them. Our project coordinator put the circuit out to bid with a few carriers that might be suitable.
After two weeks, we were tired of waiting for MPLS price quotes from the variety of carriers that contacted. This is a service business and we can’t just wait like that. So it was decided that we had to contact an Angola based carrier directly. Our database has carriers all over the world, but we never had a request for Angola!
Looking for a carrier in Angola is a challenge, since it is not the most modern country. In addition, Portugese is the language spoken. What is MPLS in Portugese, I ask you?
Thanks to Google Translate, one of our project managers located the national carrier. Attempts at email failed to obtain a response, so a phone call was required. Some of you might remember what a international call sounded like in 1965….enough echo to really play games with your concentration! That was what the call was like. Fortunately, we obtained the email address of the sales agent…after repeating the spelling six times!
An hour later, we had a quote and network diagram. Time to install: seven days!
It turns out that MPLS is not yet available in Angola, at least until Q4 2008. So we will use VPN over Internet instead. But this solution is many times better than the satellite connection that was being used. Satellite has too much latency for the type of data transfer that was required. The price quote was 300,000 Kwanza/month for 2Mbps.
What did the client need to pay for this level of service? Nada. Nothing. SD-WAN-Experts gets paid by the carrier. In this case, we were paid nothing, since we had no relationship with the Angolan carrier, but this is just one node in a network. Isn’t that what customer service is all about? Need an MPLS price quote? Do you just want to talk about your options or get some MPLS network budget numbers? Call us or just click here: https://www.sd-wan-experts.com/quotation.aspx
