Megaport - Complex Networks, Simplified. - Direct Connect

I have been using Megaport for the past two years, mostly for data center interconnectivity and dark fiber connectivity. My main use cases for Megaport include data center interconnectivity, dark fiber, cloud connectivity from on-premises network to Azure for direct interconnect, and site-to-site links.

Several of the best features I have seen with Megaport include their Megaport Cloud Router, which is a virtual layer 3 router that enables direct cloud-to-cloud data transfers quickly. Other features are direct private on-ramps, providing dedicated layer 2 connectivity, and Megaport Virtual Edge, which is an on-demand virtual network function that provides additional capabilities, including Megaport storage and compute extensions in the data center.

Out of these features, I rely most on the layer 2 connectivity and virtual edge for cross-connects from one site, which has made my work easier. Megaport has positively impacted our enterprise networking by shifting our infrastructure from rigid physical telecom contracts to greater flexibility, which has reduced our costs and egress fees. It has also saved us time by providing rapid provisioning of services and the flexibility to change the speeds as per requirements. There are no fixed and binding lock-in contracts, and the elimination of these lock-ins and unused overheads has made our operations much easier.

Although Megaport has been improving over the years, one area for improvement is layer 7 deep BGP integration, as it currently lacks in this area. While it excels at layer 2 and layer 3, it lacks deep layer 7 inspection, graphs, application firewalls, or any built-in SASE or Zero Trust Networks, based on my understanding. Additionally, I would like them to improve analytics, visibility, and telemetry depth. A further area to enhance is pricing and billing predictability in connections. Although Megaport operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, sometimes there is not enough data to confirm the endpoint output bill.

The improvements needed for Megaport particularly include layer 7 deep inspection capabilities and security, as well as analytics and cost management in terms of baseline parameters and idle networks.

I have been working for around 15 years in my field.

In terms of Megaport's reliability, I find it to be spot on, with almost 100% uptime SLA on its core backbone that I have experienced over the past two to three years. The only time I have seen it go down was during a national outage when a submarine cable was broken, which happens roughly once every three or four years. Otherwise, it has been consistently reliable and is a very diverse provider.

Based on my experience, Megaport is very stable, with minimal downtime observed, only once in three years.

I would say Megaport is one of the most scalable systems I have worked on from a network point of view. I can scale up or down through the portal as needed, and it consistently provides low-latency networks. The flexibility Megaport provides to scale up and down is one of the key factors that attracted us.

In terms of support, it is quite good and professional from Megaport with 24/7 global dedicated support, though it could further improve if they have more local staff rather than overseas. Megaport's customer support is excellent, providing reliable assistance whenever needed. I would rate the customer support 10 out of 10.

I recall that I was using a different solution that experienced many more outages, which prompted me to switch. The flexibility Megaport provides to scale up and down is one of the key factors that attracted us.

In terms of ROI for Megaport, it has certainly helped us reduce costs and save time. Since switching to Megaport, we have been transferring around hundreds of terabytes of data per month out of our clouds and managing three core branches and data centers. In the legacy three-year setup with MPLS point-to-point circuits, our costs were around $12,000 per month, while public internet cloud egress fees averaged around $9,000 per month. Comparatively, Megaport costs us roughly $7,000 per month, resulting in a 70% reduction, and we expect a net financial return of more than 500k over three years.

My experience with Megaport's licensing and setup cost is pretty good, as I work directly with partner account managers. They assist me step by step through the licensing, support, and base fees, and I have had no complaints.

Before choosing Megaport, we evaluated a couple of options, including Focus, another cloud provider. However, we decided on Megaport due to its quick provisioning and flexibility in the management portal.

I rate Megaport around a nine out of ten overall. I choose 9 out of 10 because there are always margins for improvement. The only way I would elevate it to a 10 is due to the lack of deep native security on layer 7, and there are some routing table constraints I have seen, specifically strict BGP routing limits, along with some overhead costs on the base that can improve to reach a 10.

Regarding Megaport's AI capabilities, it focuses on high-performance networking for data, which is backed by private infrastructure security and governance. Instead of providing foundational AI models, Megaport supplies the private, low-latency transport layer, known as Megaport AI Exchange, which operates rigorously and complies with GDPR, HIPAA, and other regulations.

Evaluating Megaport's AI orchestration software from a physical AI infrastructure perspective, given that Megaport is primarily a networking vendor, I find that it is quite accurate in terms of its physical networking capabilities. In terms of its AI-agentic orchestration accuracy, I score it around 85 to 95% most of the time.

In our environment, we are currently using Megaport on their own cloud and are not deployed as a SaaS application. We have not deployed it on our own cloud. When we use Megaport as a network-as-a-service, we contact Megaport directly through our account manager, and we are not using a third party. We are using AWS and Azure Cloud through Megaport.

In terms of Megaport's integration capabilities with other tools, I would say it is pretty good in connecting to providers like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud resources through CI/CD pipelines. It also integrates well with Megaport Virtual Edge, working efficiently with vendors like Cisco Catalyst for SD-WAN, Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Aruba to extend branch networks directly into the private cloud backbones without extra hardware. For AI and agentic workflows, it integrates via an open-source model context protocol, MCP, and REST APIs, which are standard and allow LLM agents and orchestration tools to dynamically query. Overall, it works well, and I have no major complaints.

I advise others to approach Megaport without hesitation, as they are world-class professionals in terms of their services, management, and support, and they are also flexible and reliable in their plans for each solution. My overall review rating for Megaport is 9 out of 10.