Are there better ways to get WAN pricing information than listening to the spiels of carrier salespeople? In a word, yes. WAN pricing tools let you get carrier information and ballpark pricing from multiple vendors in minutes.

WAN pricing tools are useful for quickly creating network proposals for budgetary purposes. The information offered by two of the three services tested here is an estimate because it comes from established pricing databases and not from the providers themselves; however, it's a good gauge to work from and can aid in finding the most cost-effective way of moving data from one location to another.

WAN pricing tools let you price several combinations without having to know exactly what you want. As much as IT managers would like to believe the accounting department 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 the 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 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 digital subscriber line intra-LATA (local access and transport area) connections.

Pricing is an important issue when you are planning to buy services. The final price depends greatly on the carrier salesperson and how generous he or she is. Larger customers can negotiate better deals than smaller customers. Therefore, unless you're dealing with someone who can guarantee the price, it's best to use these numbers only as an estimate.

For this evaluation, we tested LDCircuit's LDCircuit.com, Salestar/ Network Analysis Center's WinPricer, and Telco Exchange's Digital Line Pricing Tool. In the end, Salestar/NAC took top honors 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 online, while Salestar/NAC's offering runs on the Windows operating system.

Our goal was to determine which service gave the best information without sacrificing ease of use. For our test, it was important to see how quickly we could create different scenarios for bandwidth requirements and connection sites.

We ranked the three services on the types of circuits that can be priced, ease of use, flexibility, the support available, and the quality of reports generated. We thought it was important to have several options available for customers to choose from, instead of just point-to-point connections. We also considered the ability of the support staff to help us in our design.

WinPricer
WinPricer came out ahead in our tests because of its easy-to-use interface and the flexibility built into the software. Although not Web-based like the others, it was the only tool to handle our mixed hub-and-spoke and meshed frame relay environment correctly.

WinPricer installs itself onto a Windows 95, 98, or NT computer in a single-user or multiuser environment. An online version is also available for large groups, such as sales forces that need access to pricing. We would like to see wider availability of the online version so people without Wintel computers can get quotes.

We found WinPricer's interface to be the best of the three. To price point-to-point connections, the user is presented with a map of the United States, with central offices noted by dots. You select the type of connection, the carrier, and the speed by clicking on two dots (cities), then WinPricer presents the price for the connection. You can select carriers individually or choose an "all-carriers" option to get pricing from all carriers at once.