Quality of Experience Is What Distinguishes SD-WAN Products, Says NSS Labs

According to testing of a small sample of SD-WAN products by NSS Labs, the areas of primary differentiation for SD-WAN products are quality of experience (QoE) for VoIP and video performance. NSS Labs claims to be a well-known advisor to the cybersecurity industry. “We do both testing of cybersecurity products and research on trends in the industry,” said a spokesperson for the company. “We embarked on our test of SD-WAN products in response to strong interest from our enterprise customers and our research findings.” Recently, NSS tested these products: Barracuda NextGen Firewall F-Series F80 v7.1.1, Citrix Systems Inc. NetScaler SD-WAN 10.0.0.207, Cradlepoint AER2200-600M v6.5.0, FatPipe Networks MPVPN/SD-WAN v9.1.2, Forcepoint NGFW 1101 vSMC 6.3.6, engine 6.3.6.19302, Fortinet FortiGate 61E v6.0.1 GA build 5068, Talari Networks Adaptive Private Networking (APN) Software vAPN 7.1, Versa Networks FlexVNF v120, VMware NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud vEdge version 3.2. The company said that testing showed there was a wide disparity in pricing and total cost of ownership as would be expected in a high-growth emerging market space. Total cost of ownership per Mb/s ranged from $5 to $496 with the average total cost of ownership per Mb/s at $134. NSS Labs said that for its testing, QoE refers to the measure of satisfaction an enterprise experiences with a voice or video service. NSS Labs tested the nine SD-WAN products using a QoE scale ranging from 1 to 5 for VoIP and video. The company considers a QoE score below 3.5 for VoIP and video represents a significantly degraded voice call/video stream, out of a maximum achievable score of 4.41 and 4.53 respectively.