SD-WAN vs MPLS in India: real rupee costs per branch

Most "SD-WAN vs MPLS" cost pages are written for US carriers and priced in dollars per Mbps. They do not carry over to India, for three reasons:

• The price gap is wider. In India, retail fibre broadband gives 100 Mbps for under ₹1,000 a month, while even the published MPLS tariff for 2 Mbps runs to thousands of rupees a month. A single MPLS megabit can cost more than a whole broadband connection.
• Last-mile quality varies widely. Fibre cuts, road works and patchy coverage outside metros mean one broadband link is not enough for a bank branch. You pay for a second link and a 4G/5G path, and the model must include them.
• Indian contracts are negotiated. Large enterprises and banks buy MPLS through tenders at rates well below list. That is why the model below uses a range, and why your own invoice matters more than any published number.

Indian banks do not switch MPLS off in one move. J&K Bank's 2025 SD-WAN e-RFP describes more than 1,000 branches, most "connected via dual MPLS links". It asks for 1,750+ SD-WAN devices on a five-year Opex model, and says the design must be "transport agnostic" and "support MPLS, ILL, DIA, Broadband, LTE, VSAT and other transports". It also requires non-SD-WAN and SD-WAN sites to interoperate during migration (JKB e-RFP).

That is the practical pattern: put SD-WAN on top of what you have, add cheaper links, and let measured performance decide which MPLS circuits to keep. Nexapp's replace MPLS approach works the same way.

We model one mid-sized branch per month, before GST. Each line shows a low-to-high range and the midpoint we use.

Assumptions and where they come from:

• MPLS 2 Mbps port, per link: ₹5,000 to ₹10,000 a month. Illustrative. The upper end sits near MTNL's published 2015 Bronze-to-Silver list rates (₹1,08,604 to ₹1,30,848 a year, or about ₹9,050 to ₹10,900 a month). Negotiated enterprise rates vary, so the lower end is an assumption.
• Business broadband, per link: ₹1,000 to ₹2,500 a month. Airtel's retail 100 Mbps plans are ₹799 to ₹1,199. We add a margin for business plans with static IPs and support. Partly sourced.
• 4G/5G SIM: ₹300 to ₹1,000 a month. A retail 2 GB-a-day plan is ₹349 for 28 days. Business, M2M or private-APN SIMs cost more. Partly sourced.
• SD-WAN edge, licence and controller, amortised over five years: ₹1,500 to ₹4,000 a month. Illustrative. Get vendor quotes.
• NOC and field support: ₹500 to ₹2,000 a month. Illustrative.
• Legacy router AMC (MPLS-only design): ₹300 to ₹800 a month. Illustrative.

What the table says:

• Hybrid (B) is mainly a performance and resilience upgrade, not a saving. It costs about 11% less than dual MPLS at the midpoint, but you get roughly 25 times the bandwidth and a third path.
• Internet-first (C) is where money moves. It costs about 48% less than dual MPLS at the midpoints. Across 100 branches that is close to ₹90 lakh a year, before one-time costs.
• The ranges overlap. A branch with a cheap MPLS contract and expensive local broadband may save nothing. That is why you should run this per site, not as a company average.

One-time and hidden costs to add:

• Dual running: keep MPLS live for one or two billing cycles while each site is proven.
• MPLS lock-in: early-termination charges or minimum terms in current contracts.
• Installation and site visits, unless you use zero-touch provisioning.
• Hardware capex, if you buy devices outright rather than on a per-site subscription.
• Penalty exposure: J&K Bank's RFP deducts 10% per device per month below 99.99% controller uptime and 20% below 99.95%. Price that risk into internet-only designs.

A single broadband link will not meet a 99.9%+ target. Three independent paths can, if the SD-WAN handles failover well:

• Diverse last miles. Two broadband providers that do not share a trench, plus a 4G/5G SIM from another operator.
• Fast, measured failover. Nexapp's SD-WAN measures loss, latency, jitter and MOS with SLA probes and moves traffic in under a second. For critical flows, duplicate mode sends each packet over two links, so one failure drops nothing.
• Keep MPLS where it earns its cost. Data centres, hubs and high-value branches may keep one MPLS circuit longer.

Bank RFPs also set performance targets. J&K Bank asks for average round-trip latency of 100 ms or less in business hours and packet loss of 0.1% or less in any one-minute window. Test your internet-first pilot sites against the same numbers.

1. Baseline every site. List circuits, contract end dates, monthly rental, bandwidth use and outages for the last 12 months.
2. Classify sites. Group branches by criticality and by which broadband and 4G/5G providers are available locally. Nexapp's NaaS connectivity suite covers 10,000+ service providers across 100,000+ pin codes.
3. Deploy SD-WAN over existing MPLS first. Put the edge in, keep MPLS as a path, and add broadband and 4G. SD-WAN and MPLS-only sites interoperate while you migrate. See Nexapp SD-WAN Enterprise.
4. Measure for one or two billing cycles. Compare per-link loss, latency and uptime against your SLA targets.
5. Retire or downgrade MPLS where the data supports it. Time each step to the contract end date to avoid early-termination charges.
6. Move security to the edge. Local internet breakout needs branch security. Nexapp edges carry IPS, gateway antivirus and web filtering (NGFW), with SSE/ZTNA on the same platform when you need it.

For banks and ATM networks, pair this with our VSAT to 4G/LTE migration playbook and the BFSI page. If you are still choosing a platform, see our comparison of SD-WAN providers in India.

MTNL Delhi MPLS VPN tariff (effective 2 September 2015); Airtel Xstream Fiber plan page (checked September 2026); TelecomTalk, Jio 28-day plans (June 2026); J&K Bank SD-WAN e-RFP JKB/CHQ/T&D/SD-WAN/2025-1489 (7 August 2025). SD-WAN, NOC and router AMC figures are illustrative assumptions, not quotes.