A 2021 contract in a 2026 market. The deployment modernized. The billing didn’t.
Your SD-WAN Deployment Was the Right Call in 2021
The Contract Is Still Billing Like It’s 2021.
By Bill Henrichs
Founder & President, Bearstone LLC | Former Head of Telecommunications, Simon Property Group
When I ran telecommunications at Simon Property Group, the most expensive contracts we carried were never the ones we negotiated badly. They were the ones we negotiated well — and then stopped watching. A strong deal stays strong for a year or two. Then the market moves underneath it, and the people closest to the contract are usually the last to notice. SD-WAN is now producing that exact pattern across enterprise IT, on a faster clock.
A large wave of enterprises deployed SD-WAN between 2021 and 2023. At the time it was the right decision. Cloud and SaaS performance demanded direct paths, paying an MPLS premium everywhere no longer made sense, and software-defined policy let teams steer traffic intelligently for the first time. The deployment worked. The architecture modernized. And then, in most organizations, active management of the underlying contract quietly stopped — because the project was marked “done.” That is where the exposure begins.
There is a second drift happening alongside the financial one. What was sold in 2021 as a simplified overlay has, for most enterprises, evolved into something multi-vendor and policy-heavy: more circuits, more security services layered on, more providers in the path. Each addition was a reasonable engineering decision in isolation. Together, they mean the environment you are billed for today looks very little like the clean diagram you approved at deployment. More complexity is more surface area for charges to hide on.
Three things compound from there. First, the rate goes stale. Enterprise SD-WAN and dedicated internet pricing has fallen sharply against 2024 levels — by some measures 25 to 50 percent. A contract signed in 2021 or 2022 is now delivering the same service at 25 to 40 percent above what that service costs today. Second, the auto-renewal does its job. Most of these agreements carry automatic renewal language, and they do not renew because anyone reviewed them and decided to continue. They renew because the window passed and nobody acted. Third, the billing errors accumulate. Three years of monthly invoices that no one validated line by line against the contract is three years for unauthorized charges, mis-tiered circuits, and services that were never decommissioned to settle in and become invisible.
Here is the part most teams underestimate. An unauthorized charge caught in the first 90 days can still be disputed and credited back. A charge that has been sitting on the invoice for 36 months has almost always run past the contractual dispute window — and most carrier contracts give you only 60 to 90 days. The exposure does not shrink as it ages. It just gets harder to do anything about. Time is on the carrier’s side, not yours.
A TEM system processes these invoices, and it should — it is necessary infrastructure. But processing an invoice and validating it against the contract are two different disciplines. Validation is the one that catches a rate that drifted above market, a credit that was promised during the original negotiation and never posted, or a circuit you stopped using two architectures ago. That work has to be assigned to someone. It does not happen on its own.
The numbers make the case better than I can. In a 31-month governance engagement with a multi-brand retail portfolio — hundreds of locations, two carriers — validating every invoice against contract terms identified $2,122,436 in unauthorized charges. Of that, $1,852,314 was credited back to the client: an 87 percent collection rate. The portfolio’s approved telecom budget fell 16.9 percent from FY2024 to FY2025 — not because anyone cut services, but because charges that should never have been on the invoice came off it. None of that came from renegotiating. It came from validating what each contract actually permitted, every month, and disputing what did not match.
So if you deployed SD-WAN three or more years ago and a renewal is on the horizon, do one thing before you sit down to renegotiate. Commission a full validation first: every invoice from deployment to present, every charge mapped to a contracted term, every SLA credit calculated against actual performance records. The reason is simple. If you renegotiate a contract that still contains errors, you do not eliminate them — you re-base them into the new rate and carry them forward for another three years. Governance first, negotiation second. In that order, the negotiation is built on something real.
The SD-WAN was the right call. It still is. The contract just needs someone whose actual job is to watch it — every month, against the terms you agreed to, for as long as the money is moving.
