Global Internet: the pitfalls of DIY connectivity – role by role

All strategic decisions involve trade-offs. Managing your global connectivity is no different: do it yourself or outsource it to a third party?

You may be dealing with a manageable number of vendors. Or have the illusion that doing it all in-house gives you control and saves you costs. But what you may be saving on outsourcing your global connectivity might be putting the burden somewhere else.

Don’t get us wrong. For some organizations, it works. But few enterprises have their IT expertise spread evenly around the world … and what delivers great ROI in New York might not be as effective in New Guinea. (Or even New Haven.)

Remember: Getting the most out of your global internet means customizing it to take advantage of each location’s opportunities. And a DIY approach may not be optimal for that.

This deserves explaining. So, we thought we’d flag up what you could be trading off with the DIY route – not just a shopping list of problems, but expert perspectives seen through the eyes of several job roles we’ve come across. Let’s jump in!

The Network Manager’s moan: too much one-size-fits-all

Let’s start with the people burdened with the biggest role in DIYing: those designing a global internet solution that connects all sites and territories. The key pitfall here: assuming what works in Location 1 is also the best choice for Location 101.

After all, if HQ is having a good experience with Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) it might seem a logical choice for everywhere else: the same hardware, standard contracts, similar service requirements rolled out in every country. It sounds simple – but it misses the details of each location’s situation.

A lights-off distribution center has very different internet needs from a bustling office downtown. And two data centers 50km apart that talk mostly to each other don’t need to do it over the public internet: point-to-point may be the way to go.

This dilemma illustrates the key problem with network service design: to get best-fit performance at every node, you’ve got to get your feet wet, looking at what services are available locally and mixing and matching to join them together. Which of course creates complexity.  

But trying to keep things consistent misses many efficiency savings.

Over to the next step – who is managing your deployments?

Unmanageable project management

Once you’ve ticked all the boxes in your WAN design, it is time to get it up and running—for every site and with each local provider.

Thing with internet connections, it is still a physical installation: actual fiber running through walls and into your offices, factories, and data centers. Some require build work, local permits, and plenty of chasing local providers to make sure these are delivered on time. Other times, you might even need a plan B.

At a recent installation in the US, we encountered a railroad blocking the path to our customer’s site. Digging was possible, but would come with great delays and even greater investments. Our experts picked up on this issue and proposed a wireless point-to-point instead of fiber, saving our client time and thousands of dollars.

We are not saying you cannot do this in-house. We are just saying it’s not that straightforward, especially on a global scale with multiple ISPs, languages, and time zones in play.

What’s next? The support staff making sure lights are always on.

The limits in lifecycle management: supporting services globally

When everything’s going smoothly, few users realize how much complexity exists under the surface. But in a global hybrid network – perhaps DIA at one location, an ISP’s broadband at another, satellite connectivity at a rural site – the quality and performance of your underlay are critical for the overlay to work well. And supporting and maintaining that underlay sourced inhouse means dealing with different companies, different levels of SLA, and different upgrade pathways to follow as time goes on.

So service support with a DIY approach is many-layered: escalation paths, recourse agreements, what’s in-contract and what’s not. And if more than one provider is involved, it’s common for fingers to point at each other rather than solve the problem.

Dealing with multiple points of contact across different portals has downsides, especially for the user sitting at their desk, unable to get their work done. So your engineers on the ground will need more training, higher pay, and more incentives to stay with you – maybe a budget hit you never expected.

Let’s move across to admin roles, with the Procurement Department.

The Procurement person’s pitfall: juggling paperwork

The job of signing contracts with a provider typically falls to Procurement. And before the dotted line gets signed, there’s a process of listing potential suppliers, reviewing them for suitability, collecting (and waiting for) quotes, and making sure SLAs stack up. Then, you must onboard them: in your tooling and finance systems. With a DIY approach, this means time. And time means money.

What if a location needs guaranteed bandwidth, but only best-effort fits the budget? And what if a Procurement person doesn’t understand the technical variation between contended and uncontended fiber, or between two providers offering the same service but with different definitions in their SLAs?

The financial focus of the Procurement Team may mean some business requirements aren’t met, leading to subpar solutions in-country. And once the contract’s signed – too late. It’s why minor mistakes can have big consequences … a problem shared with their colleagues in Accounts.

The Accounts department’s dilemma: keeping contracts rolling

A hundred partners around the world may mean a hundred invoices each month, often in different currencies, tax structures, and with different payment terms. Flawless service with a DIY approach needs very, very close attention from the people making the payments.

Are those 30-day terms net or gross? Are those local taxes budgeted for? What grace period is there before services go dark? What about renewals, and what are the cancellation policies if we don’t want to? Fees and penalties can add up.

So while you’re thinking about global internet that connects 100 sites, spare a thought for the junior accounts person who has to sort through a thick stack of PDFs in her email and approve them one by one. And the Legal team don’t fare much better.

The Lawyers’ trap: a patchwork of regulations

A contract can look great on the surface – but have dealbreakers buried in the small print. So if you’re Doing It Yourself with your connectivity, legal advice is essential – and the more providers you partner with, the more hours they’ll be billing for.

Some conditions may be impossible to enforce, or only apply in a local courtroom. Negotiations may need language expertise or local lawyers for signatures. In some countries, foreign companies don’t even qualify as a customer if they don’t have a base there.

That’s the major legal issue with DIY: local partners, from national telcos to tiny ISPs, will be governed by different legal frameworks and traditions – and redress may be hard if things go wrong.

Complexity fades away: the advantages of an aggregator

It’s clear that successful DIY connectivity needs a lot of work from many professional areas, not just the IT Department. And while “marketplaces” exist, letting you contract with local providers and build a patchwork of different services that answer your plan, you’ll still have to manage each provider and service individually. With the same complications of technologies, paperwork, legal frameworks, and billing issues above.

Fortunately, there’s another way.

An ISP aggregator (sometimes called an ISP broker) will help you with the burden of sourcing and managing your global connectivity: all your services under one single contract, one invoice, one point of contact for support.  

And that is what we do at GNX, with a plus. Not only we absorb the complexity of dealing with carriers and local ISPs for your underlay networks, but we give customers access to our automated platform, GNX+, with a choice of over 2,000 ISPs, MSPs, telcos, and other providers in nearly 200 countries and territories – letting you build your global connectivity solution, from one single place, no matter how far-flung your locations.  

What’s more: you can even use GNX+ to do your sourcing for you, just as if you were shopping around for the parts of a DIY setup, with access to immediate pricing, SLAs, and lead times from competing providers, anywhere in the world.

And when that solution’s up and running, that same platform will let you monitor and manage your entire underlay, with 24/7 support from our NOC team.

If you were afraid of losing the sense of control from DIY, rest assured that you won’t.

In short, our GNX+ platform gives you the same freedom of choice as a DIY approach – without the pain of building and managing it yourself. Of course, we’d like to talk about it further. Why not contact GNX today?