I’ve learned to stop assuming a low price is a good deal.
When I took over purchasing in 2020, I was told to cut costs. The mandate was simple: get the best price from every vendor. That first year, I did exactly that. For a network infrastructure refresh, I went with a lesser-known brand that undercut the bids from Nokia and a few other big names by nearly 30%. I thought I was a hero.
It turns out, I was just creating a problem for my future self.
I’m an office administrator for a mid-sized company. I manage all the IT hardware and connectivity ordering—roughly $150,000 annually across 15 vendors. I report to both operations and finance. My job is to keep the network running and the invoices clean. The vendor failure in early 2023 changed how I think about hardware procurement. One critical network outage from that “bargain” switch, and suddenly the premium I thought I saved looked like a rounding error against the lost productivity.
The hidden cost of the 'lowest bid'
Let’s talk about the three things that cheap network hardware often doesn’t include, based on my experience:
1. Support that actually shows up. I need to plan for failures. With our current Nokia setup, if a switch goes down at 3 PM on a Tuesday, I get a human on the phone in under 10 minutes. With the budget brand from 2021, I was submitting tickets to a ticketing system. I once waited four hours for a callback about a failed router that took down our entire sales floor. The promised “24/7 support” turned out to be a chat bot and a promise to call back during business hours.
2. Firmware updates that don't break things. Nothing, and I mean nothing, makes you look bad to your VP faster than a “critical security update” that crashes the network. The cheap vendor’s firmware was a mess. Every update was a gamble. Nokia’s updates are boring—I mean that as the highest compliment. They are predictable, well-documented, and tested. Boring is good in network hardware.
3. The real price is in the total cost. When I consolidated orders for 400 employees across 3 locations in 2024, I had to look at the real math. A Nokia switch might cost 20% more upfront, but it includes the licenses, the support contract I actually trust, and the management interface that doesn't require a PhD to use. The cheap switch required a separate license for basic monitoring—that was an extra $1,200 I didn't budget for.
As of early 2025, based on my last three RFPs, Nokia’s enterprise switches are roughly in line with the market standards like Cisco, but the difference is the lack of games. The price I see is the price I pay. There are no surprise activation fees or “essential” add-ons that I discover after signing.
Vendor transparency is a feature, not an afterthought
I’ve learned to ask “what’s NOT included?” before I ask “what’s the price?”. The vendor who lists all the fees upfront—even if the total looks higher than a competitor—usually costs less in the end. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way after that 2023 network outage cost my department about $4,000 in unplanned downtime and overtime for the IT team to fix it.
I still kick myself for not digging deeper into that first vendor’s support model. If I’d asked a few pointed questions about escalation paths, I would have seen the red flags. Now, when I talk to vendors, I ask specifically about support SLAs, hardware replacement times, and the cost of firmware updates after year one. The good ones (like Nokia) have clear, written answers. The others get vague.
The inevitable pushback (and why it’s wrong)
I know what some people will say: “You’re paying for the brand name.” Or, “You’re just afraid of risk.” Honestly? There’s some truth to that. I am afraid of risk. My job is to prevent the network from failing. But it’s not just about fear. It’s about actual, quantifiable cost.
If I buy a Nokia switch for $4,000 and it runs for 7 years without a single hardware failure, I’ve paid $571 a year for reliability. If I buy a $3,000 switch that dies in year 3 and costs me $1,000 in an emergency overnight replacement (which has happened), I’m actually paying more.
This gets into supply chain and hardware durability territory, which isn’t my expertise. What I can tell you from a procurement perspective is that Nokia’s network equipment is famously durable. If I remember correctly, a colleague in manufacturing told me they still have a functioning Nokia IP router from 2010 in their test lab. You can’t put a price on that kind of track record.
Don't get me wrong: I’m not saying Nokia is perfect for every single scenario. If you’re just buying a few cheap switches for a temporary pop-up office, the high-reliability premium might not be worth it. But for the core network infrastructure that your entire company relies on daily? That’s where transparency and durability matter.
Bottom line: I stopped looking at the lowest upfront price and started looking at the total cost, which includes my sanity, the support team’s time, and the cost of failure. Nokia’s pricing is transparent. The equipment is boringly reliable. And that combination saves me more money in the long run than any cheap bid ever could.
