When you grow by acquisition, you inherit everything the acquired company was running. Their vendors. Their contracts. Their equipment. Their billing cycles. Multiply across a dozen acquisitions and you end up with what we had: about 78 US sites on a patchwork of ISP providers, contract end dates scattered across the calendar, and no central view of what was where.
The CISO initiated a consolidation to reduce vendor sprawl, improve reliability, and cut costs. I led the implementation. The technical decisions were the easy part. What follows is the part nobody puts in the project plan.
The goal was clear, the execution was 78 different problems
The target was simple: consolidate 78 sites down to two ISP providers, one aggregator and Comcast. Fewer vendors meant fewer contracts, fewer billing relationships, fewer points of failure, and better leverage on pricing.
In practice, every site was different. Different incumbent providers. Different contract terms. Different equipment in the closet. Different physical access requirements. As a seasonal company, site availability fluctuated constantly. A location that was fully operational in summer might be partially shuttered in winter, with limited on-site staff to coordinate an install.
Site surveys are the project, not preparation for the project
I managed site surveys across all affected locations, coordinating ISP visits to assess service availability. This is the unglamorous work that makes or breaks a consolidation. You need to know what each site currently has, what the new ISPs can deliver at that location, and what the physical install requirements look like before you schedule anything.
For 78 sites spread across the US, that is a lot of coordination. ISP technicians, site managers, local teams, and seasonal schedules all have to align. One missed survey means one delayed install. One delayed install means one site still running on the old provider past its contract termination date. The dollars compound from there.
The $25,000 nobody had tracked
During the project I identified a problem that had been missed in the original planning: unreturned ISP equipment. When you terminate service with an ISP, they expect their equipment back. Routers, modems, ONTs. If you do not return them, they charge you. About $2,500 per device.
Across at least 10 sites, legacy equipment from previous ISPs was sitting in closets, on shelves, forgotten in racks. Nobody had tracked it. Nobody had a return process. If those devices had not been identified and returned, the company would have been billed about $25,000 in avoidable charges.
I tracked down and returned every unit. That work does not show up on a slide. It is the kind of work that saves real money.
Cutovers run in parallel, not in sequence
A consolidation is not just connecting the new. It is disconnecting the old. The timing matters. You cannot disconnect the legacy ISP before the new one is live and tested. You cannot keep paying for both indefinitely. Every site needed a sequenced cutover: new ISP installed, tested, confirmed stable, then legacy service terminated.
I led every new ISP installation, pulling in local resources where needed, and handled every legacy termination and disconnect. Across 78 sites over six to eight months, that is a continuous pipeline of installs, cutovers, and disconnects running simultaneously. The discipline is not the technology. The discipline is the project management.
The numbers and the thing nobody puts in the case study
The consolidation cut overall ISP spend by about 50%. Vendor sprawl was eliminated. The company went from a patchwork of providers with no central visibility to two ISPs with consistent contracts, consistent equipment, and consistent support channels. The $25,000 in unreturned equipment fees was avoided entirely.
The bigger win was harder to put on a slide. The organization now had a manageable ISP landscape that could be maintained, monitored, and negotiated from a position of clarity instead of chaos. Survey every site before you plan the timeline. Audit the equipment in every closet before the legacy ISP invoices it back to you. Account for seasonality. Sequence cutovers carefully. The cost of running both providers for an extra week is nothing compared to the cost of a site going dark.
ISP consolidation projects look simple in a slide deck. The reality is logistics, coordination, and attention to the details that do not make it into the project charter. That is where the value is, and that is where most consolidations quietly fall apart.
Adam Cooper is a Technical Director writing about distributed IT operations, maritime technology, and AI in production environments. Connect on LinkedIn or get in touch.