Megaport has opened a public preview of a managed private connection to Amazon Web Services, and several of its headline features sit further down the road. The preview covers two locations, Northern Virginia and San Jose, while Megaport plans general availability for the end of 2026.
For network teams, the appeal is less about line speed and more about setup effort. For example, customers can start an order with Megaport or in the AWS console and finish it with the other. After that, the two companies take over the configuration chores that engineers usually coordinate by hand, including BGP routing, VLANs, IP subnets and MTU settings. Yet one slip in any of them can stall a rollout.
The service also drops several steps. Customers no longer arrange a dedicated port, a letter of authorization or a cross connect. However, that shift hands more troubleshooting duty to Megaport and AWS, so teams still need to know how the route reaches their sites and who owns each segment during an outage.
The product slots in between an AWS Hosted Connection and a dedicated Direct Connect link, and customers can keep using either of those. Therefore, the managed option mainly suits organizations that want more capacity without running the connection hardware themselves.
Cost is the big unknown. Megaport has not published pricing, so buyers cannot yet compare recurring fees, data transfer charges and resilience needs with what they pay now. Until then, a quicker order form says little about the real cost of switching.
The larger promises also wait for launch. At general availability, the companies plan four redundant links across two sites, MACsec encryption and speeds from 1 Gbps to 100 Gbps, and AWS says customers will adjust bandwidth in its console. Nobody should assume the preview includes all of that.
Likewise, four links do not guarantee four independent paths, so buyers should ask what equipment they share. MACsec also protects only the link itself, which means security teams must still decide where encryption begins and ends.
Geography adds another limit, since two U.S. markets leave multinational buyers guessing about other regions. Still, the choice comes down to control versus convenience, because a managed link hands setup to the providers while a dedicated one keeps more with the customer.
