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WAN pricing tools let you price several different combinations without having to know exactly what you want. As much as IT managers would like to believe that accounting will pay for whatever they want, they often have to sacrifice performance to fit within their allocated budgets. Being able to look at several size options quickly and compare bang for buck will help save time in the end. We wanted to evaluate the services to see what was out there and find out how useful the information really is. Is it possible to get accurate information without contacting the vendors directly? What types of services can we price?

We found that there are different ways of getting this information and that there are a wide variety of services that can be priced. Users can get estimates on just about every WAN service imaginable, whether it be raw SONET services or DSL intra-LATA (local access and transport area) connections. Pricing is an important issue when planning to buy new services. The final cost depends greatly on the carrier salesperson and how generous he or she feels. Larger customers can negotiate better deals than smaller customers. Therefore, unless you are dealing with someone who can guarantee the price, it is best to use these numbers only as a gauge. In other words, your mileage may vary.

Flexibility Wins

For this evaluation, we put LDCircuit's LDCircuit.com, Salestar/Network Analysis Center's WinPricer and Telco Exchange's Digital Line Pricing Tool through their paces. In the end, Salestar/Network Analysis Center took our Editor's Choice award because of WinPricer's flexibility in creating a network of any topology we could think of, quickly and easily.

Each service has its own way of doing things, which made it tricky to create a test that was fair to all three pricing tools. LDCircuit and Telco Exchange are Web-based, while Salestar's offering runs on Windows on a PC.