Two branch offices, same company, same 100 Mbps MPLS profile, same carrier. One invoice reads €780 a month, the other €2,000. Nothing is wrong with either bill. That five-fold spread is normal, and understanding where it comes from is the difference between accepting a renewal quote and negotiating one.
This article is the money side of MPLS only: what circuits actually cost per site and per megabit in Western Europe and North America, which variables drive the difference, how the contract mechanics work, and what the exit maths look like. For what MPLS is and why SD-WAN keeps replacing it, start with our explainer on MPLS networks and why SD-WAN is replacing them.
What you are actually paying for
An MPLS invoice is four charges wearing one number:
The port is the fee for terminating your circuit on the carrier’s edge router, and it sets your maximum throughput. The local loop is the physical last mile from your building to the carrier’s point of presence — the most volatile line in any quote. Class of service is the premium for priority queuing, sold either bundled, tiered by how much bandwidth you assign to high-priority queues, as a flat surcharge, or as add-ons over a best-effort base. Managed CPE is the router at your end, typically ≈€90–€320 ($100–$350) per site per month, which over a 36-month term is ≈€3,300–€11,600 ($3,600–$12,600) per site in rental for hardware you never own.
The local loop explains most of the variance between sites. In an on-net building the carrier already has active fibre at the entry point, so provisioning is fast and priced aggressively. In an off-net building the carrier leases the last mile from whoever does have fibre there and passes that cost through with a margin on top. If no fibre reaches the property line at all, you are quoted for civil works — trenching and conduit — and carrier contracts typically give you 14 to 25 days to accept or reject those construction charges.
Class of service allocation is the other lever, and it is one you control. A standard enterprise profile splits bandwidth roughly 10% voice and video, 30% real-time data, 60% best effort. Moving the priority allocation from 10% to 30% can raise the monthly charge by 15% to 30% — worth checking against what your traffic actually needs rather than what was specified when the contract was signed.
Benchmark pricing by tier and region
Street prices below are what organisations negotiate, not list. Expect list to run 30% to 50% higher.
| Bandwidth | Region | Street price per site per month | Per Mbps |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 Mbps | Western Europe / Benelux | €250 – €500 | €25.00 – €50.00 |
| 10 Mbps | North America | ≈€320 – €690 ($350 – $750) | ≈€32 – €69 ($35 – $75) |
| 50 Mbps | Western Europe / Benelux | €500 – €950 | €10.00 – €19.00 |
| 50 Mbps | North America | ≈€735 – €1,290 ($800 – $1,400) | ≈€15 – €26 ($16 – $28) |
| 100 Mbps | Western Europe / Benelux | €700 – €1,300 | €7.00 – €13.00 |
| 100 Mbps | North America | ≈€1,380 – €2,760 ($1,500 – $3,000) | ≈€14 – €28 ($15 – $30) |
| 500 Mbps | Western Europe / Benelux | €1,400 – €2,500 | €2.80 – €5.00 |
| 1 Gbps | Western Europe / Benelux | €1,100 – €1,300 | €1.10 – €1.30 |
| 1 Gbps | North America | ≈€1,320 – €2,575 ($1,439 – $2,800) | ≈€1.32 – €2.58 ($1.44 – $2.80) |
Converted from USD at ≈€0.92 per US dollar (August 2026); local pricing and VAT treatment differ by market. Figures exclude installation and construction charges. Sources: TeleGeography pricing data, Lightyear carrier benchmarks and regional market surveys, 2024–2026.
Read that table vertically and the most important line jumps out: in Western Europe, 1 Gbps costs about the same as 100 Mbps. The price of an MPLS circuit is driven far more by the access and the port than by the bits you are entitled to push through it, which means many organisations are paying near-gigabit money for a tenth of the capacity. If your contract predates your last bandwidth review, that is the first thing to check.
How MPLS compares per megabit
| Bandwidth | MPLS (EU street) | Dedicated internet access | Business broadband |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 Mbps | €25.00 – €50.00 / Mbps | ≈€14 – €32 ($15 – $35) / Mbps | ≈€2.75 – €7.35 ($3 – $8) / Mbps |
| 100 Mbps | €7.00 – €13.00 / Mbps | ≈€4.60 – €6.45 ($5 – $7) / Mbps | ≈€0.92 – €1.84 ($1 – $2) / Mbps |
| 1 Gbps | €1.10 – €1.30 / Mbps | ≈€0.89 – €1.38 ($0.97 – $1.50) / Mbps | ≈€0.28 – €0.46 ($0.30 – $0.50) / Mbps |
| International links | ≈€41 – €368 ($45 – $400) / Mbps | ≈€11 – €28 ($12 – $30) / Mbps | Not available |
Converted from USD at ≈€0.92 per US dollar (August 2026).
For reference points in absolute terms: the median North American price for a 100 Mbps dedicated internet circuit is around ≈€463 ($503) a month, and 100 Mbps business broadband around ≈€130 ($141). In Western Europe, symmetrical 1 Gbps dedicated internet runs roughly €700 to €900. The premium narrows at high bandwidth and becomes brutal at low bandwidth and on international links, where MPLS can cost ten times its internet equivalent per megabit.
One trap to watch: legacy copper-fed circuits. As European operators decommission copper, carriers are repricing what remains, and copper-based MPLS can cost up to fourteen times more per megabit than a modern fibre connection. If you still have an E1 or SDSL tail somewhere, it is almost certainly the worst-value line on your network.
The contract is where the money is
Most MPLS overspend is not caused by the wrong price. It is caused by contract mechanics that quietly keep you at the old price.
Term length. Master agreements run 36 or 60 months. A one-year term carries a 20% to 25% premium over the three-year baseline; five years buys a 10% to 15% discount, at the cost of locking in pricing while the market falls beneath you.
Minimum revenue commitments. Many agreements require a baseline annual spend across all circuits. Disconnect a branch without adding capacity elsewhere and you can trigger a shortfall penalty even when that site’s own term has expired.
Early termination fees. The standard formula is a percentage of the remaining monthly charges — typically 50% to 75% — plus repayment of any installation or construction costs the carrier waived at signing. On a €1,200 circuit with 18 months left, a 60% clause and €2,500 in waived construction, exiting costs €15,460. Multiply across ten sites before assuming an early exit is affordable.
The auto-renewal trap. This is the expensive one. Agreements typically renew for a further 12 months unless written notice arrives in a window that opens 90 days and closes 60 days before expiry. Miss it and three things happen at once: you are committed for another year, your negotiated rate can revert to list — a 20% to 40% increase — and any attempt to leave during that year triggers the full termination fee.
For Belgian and European organisations, one legal expectation is worth correcting. Consumer protections do not apply to business telecom contracts. Belgian law allows courts to review B2B clauses for manifest imbalance, but that review deliberately excludes the economics of the deal, and in January 2025 the French-speaking Business Court in Brussels held that a 50% early-exit fee is a valid termination indemnity rather than an unlawful penalty. Assume your termination clause is enforceable as written.
The practical response is a calendar, not a lawyer. Benchmark against market rates at month 18 of a 36-month term. At month 24, use a blend-and-extend: offer a fresh three-year term in exchange for resetting current circuits to today’s pricing, which gets you the benefit of price erosion without paying to break anything. And make sure new sites are co-terminated with the master agreement, so you never end up with staggered expiry dates that make a clean exit impossible.
The trajectory
MPLS port pricing falls 7% to 14% a year. That sounds like time is on your side, until you compare it with everything around it. Dedicated internet falls 8% to 15% a year, broadband 15% to 25%, and enterprise bandwidth consumption grows 30% to 50% a year. A 10% annual discount on a circuit whose capacity requirement is growing faster than that is a rising cost in real terms.
The market is repricing accordingly: MPLS is falling below half of large-enterprise WAN revenue, tier-one carriers report legacy private line revenue declining around 12% a year while managed SD-WAN bookings grow around 27%. Carrier behaviour in that decline is predictable — raising prices on ageing low-bandwidth links to force migration, while selling their own SD-WAN overlays with a markup of roughly 20% on the underlying internet circuits they resell.
The copper switch-off adds a hard deadline in several markets. KPN is targeting a 90% copper phase-out across its fibre footprint by 2027, Belgium’s regulator has phased disconnections accelerating through 2026, Spain completed its national copper shutdown in May 2025, and the UK is heading for full retirement by January 2027. If any of your sites still runs on copper, the decision about that circuit is being made for you.
What exiting actually saves
For a ten-site network at 100 Mbps per site, replacing dual MPLS with dual internet underlays managed through SD-WAN or SASE typically moves a three-year total of roughly €590,000–€645,000 ($640,000–$700,000) to €368,000–€405,000 ($400,000–$440,000). Transport spend falls sharply; platform licensing, edge hardware and management appear as new lines. The net is a 30% to 40% reduction, usually with several times the bandwidth at each site.
Converted from USD at ≈€0.92 per US dollar (August 2026).
Budget for the costs that come with leaving: unamortised installation discounts clawed back, ≈€920–€2,760 ($1,000–$3,000) per unreturned carrier router, 30 to 60 days of parallel running while new circuits are installed, and disconnection administration fees. None of these are dealbreakers, but they belong in the business case rather than in a surprise invoice. The sequencing of that migration is its own subject, which we cover in the MPLS replacement exit playbook, and the feature-level trade-offs are set out in our SD-WAN versus MPLS comparison.
When keeping MPLS is the right call
Three objections come up in every one of these conversations, and two of them have aged badly.
“Our ERP and voice need deterministic latency.” This was decisive a decade ago. Today, dedicated internet circuits carry SLAs with latency, packet loss and 99.99% availability guarantees comparable to MPLS, and SD-WAN platforms add forward error correction and per-packet path steering across two diverse links. Practitioner testing consistently shows voice surviving 2% to 5% packet loss with those mechanisms active — a condition that would destroy a single unprotected circuit.
“Our SLA has financial teeth.” It has financial teeth in the sense that a 4-hour repair target and a service credit exist. The credit is typically 5% to 10% of one month’s charge, must be claimed through an audit process, and does not begin to cover the cost of the outage. Two diverse paths that fail independently deliver more availability than one path with a compensation clause.
“MPLS is private, so it is secure.” Private is not encrypted. MPLS traffic crosses the carrier backbone in cleartext, and NIS2, GDPR and ISO 27001 increasingly expect encryption in transit regardless of who owns the wire. SD-WAN and SASE encrypt by default over public underlays.
That said, MPLS genuinely remains the right answer in two situations. Remote industrial sites where no quality internet access exists and one carrier is the only option — mining, energy, some agricultural and processing facilities — have no alternative worth the risk. And environments with direct layer-2 interconnects, such as mainframe links, can face refactoring costs that dwarf any transport saving. Outside those cases, the question is not whether to leave but when your contract lets you.
Check three numbers before your next renewal
Take your most expensive circuit and work out the per-megabit cost. Compare it against the tables above. Then find the notice window in your master agreement and put it in the calendar — 90 days before expiry, not 60. Those three numbers tell you whether you are paying a fair price, an inherited one, or a lapsed-negotiation one.
If the answer points towards moving branch connectivity to internet underlays, Jimber delivers SD-WAN alongside ZTNA network isolation, secure web gateway and firewall-as-a-service from one EU-sovereign platform at a predictable flat rate — so the transport saving is not immediately eaten by a stack of separate security subscriptions. Book a demo and we will model it against your current circuit costs, or read more about how the SD-WAN component works.
Frequently asked questions
How much does MPLS cost per site per month in 2026?
In Western Europe, negotiated street pricing runs roughly €250–€500 for 10 Mbps, €700–€1,300 for 100 Mbps and €1,100–€1,300 for 1 Gbps per site per month. North American pricing for 100 Mbps sits around ≈€1,380–€2,760 ($1,500–$3,000). List prices typically run 30% to 50% above these figures.
What is the average price of MPLS per megabit?
Around €7 to €13 per Mbps for a 100 Mbps circuit in Western Europe, falling to €1.10–€1.30 at 1 Gbps. Dedicated internet access costs roughly ≈€4.60–€6.45 ($5–$7) per Mbps at 100 Mbps, and business broadband under €2. International MPLS links are the outlier, reaching several hundred euro per Mbps.
Why does the same bandwidth cost so much more at one office?
The local loop. In an on-net building the carrier already has fibre at the entry point and prices aggressively. Off-net, they lease the last mile from another operator and pass that through with a margin, which can make an identical circuit up to five times more expensive at one address than another.
How are MPLS early termination fees calculated?
Typically as 50% to 75% of the monthly charges remaining in the term, plus repayment of installation or construction costs the carrier waived at signing. On a €1,200 circuit with 18 months left and a 60% clause plus €2,500 in waived construction, the exit cost is €15,460.
Can a Belgian company cancel an MPLS contract early without penalty?
Not normally. Consumer protections do not extend to business telecom contracts. Belgian law permits review of B2B clauses for manifest imbalance but excludes the economics of the deal, and a January 2025 Brussels Business Court ruling upheld a 50% early-exit fee as a valid termination indemnity rather than an unlawful penalty.
What is the typical auto-renewal period on an MPLS agreement?
Twelve months, unless written notice is served in a window that generally opens 90 days and closes 60 days before expiry. Missing it commits you for another year, can revert negotiated pricing to list rates — a 20% to 40% increase — and makes any exit during that year subject to full termination fees.
How much do managed carrier routers add to the bill?
Roughly ≈€90–€320 ($100–$350) per site per month, which totals ≈€3,300–€11,600 ($3,600–$12,600) per site over a 36-month term. The equipment stays the carrier’s property, and configuration changes usually require a paid change order rather than direct access for your own team.
How much can we save by moving off MPLS?
Organisations replacing MPLS with dual internet underlays managed through SD-WAN or SASE typically cut total WAN cost by 30% to 40% over three years while increasing site bandwidth several times over. Factor in exit costs: clawed-back installation discounts, unreturned router charges and 30 to 60 days of parallel running.
