Both connect your branches. But one treats your traffic like a private road and the other like a public highway. For businesses with real latency or security requirements, the choice is clear.
The Core Question: What Is a WAN?
A Wide Area Network (WAN) connects your business locations — headquarters, branches, warehouses, data centres — into a single unified network. Your staff in Kumasi can access the server in Accra. Your Takoradi branch can use the same VoIP phone system as your head office. Your management dashboard pulls data from all sites in real time.
The question is not whether you need a WAN — if you have multiple locations, you do. The question is what technology you use to build it. The two dominant options are MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) and Internet VPN (Virtual Private Network over the public internet). They are fundamentally different approaches with different performance characteristics, cost profiles, and risk postures.
How MPLS Works
MPLS is a private networking technology operated by your ISP or telecommunications carrier. Your traffic travels across a dedicated private network infrastructure — not the public internet. Each packet of data is assigned a label at the network edge, and routers forward it based on that label rather than inspecting the full packet header. This makes MPLS extremely fast and predictable.
Key characteristics of MPLS include: traffic travels on a private network, never touching the public internet; Quality of Service (QoS) is enforced at the network level, guaranteeing bandwidth and latency for specific traffic types (voice, video, data); latency is consistent and predictable, typically in the low single-digit milliseconds between sites; security is inherent — your traffic is logically isolated from other customers' traffic; and the network is managed by your service provider, with SLAs covering availability and performance.
MPLS is the gold standard for enterprises that require predictable performance for latency-sensitive applications — particularly VoIP, video conferencing, and real-time financial transactions.
How Internet VPN Works
An Internet VPN creates an encrypted tunnel between your sites over the public internet. Each location needs a VPN gateway (typically a firewall or dedicated VPN router), and all inter-site traffic is encrypted before being sent across the internet and decrypted at the destination.
Internet VPN is significantly cheaper than MPLS because it uses the shared public internet infrastructure rather than dedicated private circuits. However, 'best-efforts' is the operative term. Internet performance varies based on congestion, routing changes, and the quality of the last-mile connections at each site. Latency can spike unpredictably. Packet loss during periods of internet congestion can cause voice calls to drop and video streams to pixelate. Quality of Service cannot be enforced end-to-end across the public internet.
The Performance Gap: Where It Shows Up
The performance difference between MPLS and Internet VPN is most visible in latency-sensitive applications. VoIP calls require consistent latency below 150ms and packet loss below 1% for acceptable voice quality. Video conferencing is similarly demanding. Enterprise applications — ERP systems, database queries, financial trading platforms — can be severely impacted by high or variable latency.
On an MPLS network, these applications perform predictably because your ISP guarantees the network conditions end-to-end. On an Internet VPN, performance depends on what the public internet is doing at any given moment — and during peak hours across Ghana's internet infrastructure, that can mean significant degradation.
For businesses running cloud-based applications (Microsoft 365, SAP, Oracle, banking platforms), MPLS also provides more consistent access because your traffic enters the internet at the carrier's high-capacity network edge rather than through your branch's local internet connection.
Cost: The Real Comparison
MPLS costs more than Internet VPN. For a typical Ghanaian enterprise connecting three to five sites, MPLS will cost significantly more per month than an equivalent Internet VPN solution. This is a real consideration and should not be dismissed.
However, the cost comparison needs to be complete. Internet VPN requires more complex firewall configurations, regular security audits, and certificate management. Performance problems often require expensive troubleshooting because the public internet is opaque — you cannot see what is happening inside it. When voice quality degrades, diagnosing whether the problem is your connection, your VPN gateway, or somewhere in the public internet is time-consuming and difficult.
MPLS issues, by contrast, are your provider's problem to diagnose and fix — covered by your SLA. The management overhead of MPLS is substantially lower.
SD-WAN: The Third Option
Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) has emerged as a middle ground between pure MPLS and pure Internet VPN. An SD-WAN solution uses software to intelligently route traffic across multiple underlying connections — which can be a mix of MPLS, dedicated internet, and 4G/5G — based on real-time network conditions.
SD-WAN can prioritise latency-sensitive traffic (VoIP, video) over the best-performing available link, fail over automatically when a link degrades, and provide centralised visibility and management of all WAN links from a single dashboard. It is increasingly popular for enterprises that want some of the performance benefits of MPLS with some of the cost benefits of internet connectivity.
Which Should You Choose?
Choose MPLS if your business runs latency-sensitive applications (VoIP, video conferencing, real-time financial systems); you have regulatory or compliance requirements for data privacy; you require guaranteed performance SLAs with financial backing; or your operations cannot tolerate unpredictable network performance.
Choose Internet VPN if your applications are relatively latency-tolerant; your branches primarily access cloud services rather than on-premise servers; budget is the primary constraint; or your team has the technical capability to manage VPN infrastructure.
Consider SD-WAN if you want to optimise across multiple connection types; you need centralised WAN visibility and management; or you want to transition from MPLS to a hybrid model while managing cost and risk.
At Boldnet, we design WAN solutions using MPLS for clients where performance is non-negotiable. We also deploy hybrid SD-WAN architectures where cost optimisation is required without sacrificing reliability. Contact us to discuss which architecture is right for your specific situation.