If you manage IT across multiple locations, you already know the Monday morning feeling: three different carriers have sent invoices, a branch site is down, and you're on hold with two separate support desks — each one trying to connect you to someone who can help. Vendor juggling is one of the most persistent and draining realities of multi-site IT management, and it costs your organization more than most leadership teams realize.
This guide walks you through a practical, step-by-step approach to consolidating your connectivity stack by partnering with s2s Communications — an ISP Aggregation specialist that includes Ericsson/Cradlepoint solutions as a core part of their managed service offering. With s2s in your corner, you will spend less time managing vendor relationships and more time growing your business.
Understanding the Vendor Juggling Problem
Vendor juggling happens when your network depends on a patchwork of separate ISPs, SD-WAN providers, security vendors, and equipment suppliers — each operating under different contracts, SLAs, and support portals. For multi-site IT managers, this fragmentation creates compounding problems:
- Operational drag: Every vendor relationship requires its own point of contact, renewal cycle, and escalation path. Multiply that across ten or twenty sites and the administrative load becomes a job in itself.
- Visibility gaps: When each vendor has its own monitoring dashboard, you never get a complete picture of network health. Incidents fall through the cracks between systems.
- Finger-pointing during outages: When something breaks, vendors blame each other. Mean time to resolution climbs while your sites suffer.
- Budget complexity: Fragmented billing across multiple accounts makes it nearly impossible to forecast accurately or identify waste.
The financial impact is real. Administrative overhead, overlapping service fees, and emergency service premiums from multiple providers quietly inflate your total cost of ownership well beyond what the line-item contracts suggest.
Why Partnering with s2s Communications Changes the Equation
s2s Communications is a managed internet services provider built specifically for multi-location businesses. Their ISP Aggregation service consolidates your carrier relationships, billing, and support into a single managed experience — and they do it using Ericsson/Cradlepoint's industry-leading cloud-managed networking platform as part of the solution.
Together, s2s and Ericsson/Cradlepoint deliver:
- Single pane of glass management giving your team unified visibility across every site
- Support for fiber, broadband, LTE, and 5G — so you're not locked into a single connectivity type
- Automatic failover between connections to maintain uptime without manual intervention
- Integrated security features including network segmentation and policy enforcement
- Real-time analytics and reporting across every site from one interface
- Consolidated billing and vendor management handled by s2s — one invoice, one support desk, one relationship
Critically, s2s operates as a carrier-agnostic partner. They source and manage the best carriers for your locations. This gives you leverage in carrier negotiations without sacrificing operational consistency — and without you having to manage any of it directly.
Step-by-Step: How s2s Communications Consolidates Your Connectivity
Step 1: Audit Your Current Vendor Ecosystem (Weeks 1–2)
Before simplifying, s2s will build a complete picture of what you're working with. With your support, s2s will document every vendor, every contract, and every service across all your sites. This vendor inventory captures:
- Vendor name and service type
- Contract term and renewal dates
- Monthly cost per site
- Current pain points or SLA gaps
Overlapping services get identified early — you may be paying two vendors for capabilities that s2s can handle as one. This audit becomes your baseline for calculating ROI.
Step 2: Map Your Network Requirements (Weeks 1–2)
Alongside the vendor audit, s2s assesses what your network actually needs. For each site, they document:
- Current and projected bandwidth requirements
- Redundancy and uptime expectations
- Security and compliance obligations
- Application performance priorities
This step prevents under-provisioning during migration and gives s2s clear requirements to bring to carrier conversations on your behalf.
Step 3: Define Your Consolidation Strategy (Weeks 3–5)
With the audit and requirements in hand, s2s builds a tailored deployment strategy. Key decisions at this stage include:
- Carrier approach: Which connections will remain and which will be terminated and/or replaced?
- Site prioritization: Which locations have the most to gain — or the most risk if migration goes wrong?
- Success metrics: KPIs are defined upfront. MTTR, network uptime, vendor count, and administrative hours are all measurable benchmarks s2s tracks on your behalf.
Step 4: Execute a Pilot Deployment (Weeks 6–9)
s2s selects two or three sites with different connectivity profiles for the initial rollout. For those receiving wireless, s2s will install and configure Ericsson/Cradlepoint appliances, connect them to NetCloud Manager, and set up your baseline policies and failover rules.
Best practices s2s follows during this phase:
- Start with lower-risk locations where a brief disruption is tolerable
- Run the new connections in parallel with existing infrastructure before cutting over
- Conduct staff orientation during the pilot — not after full rollout
Step 5: Consolidate Carrier and Service Relationships (Weeks 10–12)
Once the pilot validates the approach, s2s begins renegotiating with retained carriers on your behalf. Consolidation gives you volume leverage — s2s uses it. They establish unified SLAs, streamline points of contact, and begin migrating traffic away from vendors being eliminated.
s2s also reviews contract termination clauses carefully. Early termination fees are real, but most organizations find that even with penalties, consolidation pays for itself within 12–18 months — and s2s can model that ROI for you before you commit.
Step 6: Optimize Configuration and Scale (Weeks 13–20)
s2s fine-tunes traffic policies, application routing priorities, and security configurations based on pilot learnings. They then execute a rolling deployment across remaining sites, maintaining consistent Ericsson/Cradlepoint configurations throughout. As each site goes live, old vendor infrastructure is decommissioned and billing is consolidated into s2s's single-invoice model.
Step 7: Ongoing Managed Support
With s2s as your managed services partner, ongoing network management is handled for you. They maintain standardized runbooks, monitor dashboards, handle all trouble resolution, and conduct regular architecture reviews. Instead of coordinating across multiple vendor support teams, you have one relationship — with a team that knows your environment end to end.
Expected Benefits and ROI
The operational and financial gains from partnering with s2s Communications are significant across several categories:
| Cost Category | Multi-Vendor Approach | s2s + Ericsson/Cradlepoint | Estimated Monthly Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor management overhead | High (staff hours across multiple portals) | Low (single managed partner) | $1,500–$3,000 |
| Service provider fees | Fragmented, limited volume leverage | Consolidated, negotiated rates | 10–20% reduction |
| SLA penalty exposure | Multiple SLAs, frequent gaps | Unified SLA accountability via s2s | Variable |
| Staff training costs | Multiple platforms and certifications | Single platform, s2s-managed | $500–$1,500 |
| Incident resolution time | Extended (cross-vendor coordination) | Reduced (single-pane visibility + dedicated support) | Measurable MTTR improvement |
Beyond cost, unified management means faster incident resolution, consistent security policy enforcement across all sites, and the ability to scale new locations without reinventing your vendor stack each time.
Common Challenges — and How s2s Handles Them
Resistance to change: s2s provides a clear onboarding and communication plan. The phased approach is designed to reduce disruption and demonstrate early wins to your internal stakeholders.
Contract termination costs: s2s will run a full ROI model including penalties so you can make an informed decision before moving forward. Most organizations find consolidation pays for itself within 12–18 months.
Migration complexity: s2s never cuts over cold. Parallel running periods and documented rollback plans are standard practice during every site migration.
New vendor dependency concerns: Because s2s is carrier-agnostic and Ericsson/Cradlepoint supports multiple connection types, you're reducing vendor count strategically — not trading one dependency for another.
Staff skill gaps: With s2s managing the connectivity, including the Ericsson/Cradlepoint environment, your team doesn't need to become platform experts. s2s handles the complexity so you don't have to.
Measuring Success
s2s tracks these metrics from day one so you can demonstrate value to leadership:
- Monthly administrative hours spent on vendor management
- Mean time to resolution (MTTR) for network incidents
- Network uptime percentage across all sites
- Total cost of ownership reduction
Set realistic timelines: quick wins appear in the first three to six months, major cost savings materialize between six and twelve months, and full optimization typically arrives at the twelve-month mark and beyond.
Conclusion
Vendor juggling isn't just an annoyance — it's a structural inefficiency that costs your organization money, slows incident response, and prevents your team from focusing on higher-value work. By partnering with s2s Communications, you get a single managed services provider that handles ISP aggregation, carrier negotiations, billing consolidation, and network management, including Ericsson/Cradlepoint's best-in-class Wireless WAN platform.
Your next steps are straightforward:
- Start your vendor audit — s2s can facilitate this process and help you build the business case
- Request a consultation with s2s to see how their managed service maps to your specific environment
- Get a tailored deployment roadmap from s2s, including an ROI model based on your current vendor spend
The complexity you're managing today doesn't have to be the complexity you manage tomorrow. s2s Communications can help you get there.
Stop managing carriers. Start managing your business.
When vendor juggling consumes your IT team's time, your actual network strategy suffers. s2s Communications consolidates your carriers, billing, and support into one managed relationship so you can focus on what matters to your organization.