Five circuit vendors means five support queues, five escalation paths, five sets of account managers who don't talk to each other, and five different definitions of what counts as resolved. None of that complexity shows up on the original procurement spreadsheet. It shows up later, during outages, renewals, and every other moment that wasn't part of the original plan.
The hidden cost isn't the contracts, it's the coordination
Negotiating five vendor contracts is a finite task with a clear endpoint. Managing five vendor relationships on an ongoing basis is not. Every outage requires figuring out which vendor owns the affected circuit, opening a ticket with that specific vendor's process, and tracking the resolution independently, because none of the other four vendors have any visibility into it. When an issue touches more than one vendor's segment, as outages sometimes do, there's no single party responsible for coordinating the resolution across all of them.
Escalation paths don't scale linearly, they multiply
Each additional vendor relationship isn't just one more contact. It's one more escalation hierarchy to learn, one more account team to build trust with, one more vendor-specific process for getting a problem prioritized. Internal teams end up holding institutional knowledge about how to escalate effectively with each vendor individually, and that knowledge walks out the door when the person who built those relationships leaves.
Consolidation doesn't mean fewer options, it means one place to manage them
The case for a single point of contact isn't an argument for reducing the number of carriers in your network. It's an argument for not being the one who has to track all of them. A managed model keeps the underlying diversity, different carriers for different sites based on what's actually best for each one, while routing support, escalation, and billing through a single relationship instead of five separate ones.
What this looks like operationally
One ticketing path regardless of which underlying carrier is affected. One team that already knows which vendor owns which circuit and has existing relationships with each of them for fast escalation. One consolidated view of performance and billing across the full vendor set, instead of five logins and five invoices to reconcile separately.
The real question to ask
It's not whether five vendor relationships are too many. It's whether your internal team should be the ones managing the coordination between them, or whether that coordination is better handled by a partner whose entire function is managing exactly this kind of complexity.