If your business runs more than a handful of sites, your telco spend has a particular shape, and we’d bet money on it before opening a single invoice. Head office on decent fibre. The warehouse on NBN. A regional branch limping along on whatever was available the year it opened. Each site got its connection when it got it, from whoever could deliver, and nobody has reviewed the whole picture since.

Multi-site businesses are where we find the biggest telco waste, consistently. Not because anyone was careless, but because connectivity bought site-by-site over a decade produces a portfolio nobody designed and nobody owns.

The MPLS legacy tax

The biggest single offender is the legacy MPLS network. For twenty years MPLS was the respectable enterprise answer for connecting sites: private links, guaranteed bandwidth, and prices set in an era when there was no alternative. A 100 Mbps link between two capitals can run $1,500 to $2,500 a month. Across ten sites that’s a quarter of a million dollars a year, spent before anyone opens a browser.

Businesses keep paying it for two reasons. The contract auto-renews, and the network works, so nobody wants to touch it. Both are understandable. Neither changes the fact that equivalent reliability is now available for 60-70% less, because SD-WAN over modern fibre does what MPLS did at consumer-adjacent link prices. For that same ten-site business, the modern equivalent typically lands between $95,000 and $140,000 a year, with better cloud performance and new sites connected in days instead of the 8 to 12 weeks an MPLS addition takes.

If your MPLS contract predates 2020 and hasn’t been to market since, you are almost certainly paying the legacy tax.

The other leaks multi-site creates

• Site-grade mismatch. Enterprise-grade fibre at a depot with three staff, and contended NBN at the branch doing a third of company revenue. Allocations set by history, not by what each site earns or risks.
• Redundant redundancy. Backup links at sites that could tolerate a day offline, no backup at sites that couldn’t tolerate an hour.
• Orphaned links. Sites close and consolidate; their data services keep billing. The more sites, the more closures, the more orphans. On consolidated invoices spanning dozens of locations, a dead link for a closed site is invisible.
• Carrier sprawl. Five sites, four carriers, four bills, four support numbers, and no single rate negotiation across any of it. Every carrier prices you as a small customer because to each of them, you are.

Why nobody inside can see it

The information needed to fix this sits in three different places. Finance has the invoices but can’t tell an essential link from a dead one. IT knows what each site needs but doesn’t see the bills. And the contracts live wherever the person who signed them filed them, possibly before two restructures ago. Assembling the full picture (every site, every service, every contract, every dollar) is real work, which is why it stays unassembled, and why the waste compounds quietly year after year.

Carriers understand this perfectly. Multi-site accounts on legacy contracts are among their most profitable business, precisely because the customer can’t easily see the whole board.

Seeing the whole board

This assembly job is the core of what a Telco Health Check does for a multi-site business: every location, every service and every contract in one view, matched against what each site actually needs and what the market now charges. The outcome is a list of concrete corrections, from dead links to cancel this week, to the MPLS renegotiation worth six figures over its term. For multi-site operations the findings are rarely subtle. There are simply too many places for money to hide, and too many years since anyone looked.