Guide
What Is Dedicated Internet?
A circuit that belongs to your business alone, with a contract that puts numbers behind the promise.
A circuit that belongs to your business alone, with a contract that puts numbers behind the promise.
The short version
Dedicated internet access, usually shortened to DIA, is a connection that is yours and nobody else's. The bandwidth you buy is the bandwidth you get, at every hour of the day, in both directions.
Business broadband is the opposite. It is fast, it is cheap, and it is shared with every other subscriber on that segment. Most of the time that is fine. At 2pm on a Tuesday when the whole block is busy, it is less fine.
What you are actually paying for
People assume the premium buys speed. It does not. A 500 Mbps DIA circuit and a 500 Mbps broadband connection can test identically on a quiet morning.
The premium buys four things that broadband does not include.
- Symmetrical bandwidth. Upload matches download. This is the one that matters most for anyone running voice, video, backups, or a VPN back to the office.
- A service level agreement with real numbers in it. Guaranteed uptime, a guaranteed time to repair, and money back when the carrier misses.
- No contention. You are not sharing the pipe. Your 500 Mbps is 500 Mbps at 2pm.
- A different support queue. DIA tickets go to a business network operations center, not the residential line.
When DIA is worth the money
- An outage costs you real revenue per hour and you can say roughly how much.
- You run hosted voice or contact center seats where jitter is immediately audible.
- You push large files up, not just down. Design, video, medical imaging, backups, CAD.
- You host anything on site that the outside world connects into.
- Compliance or a customer contract requires a documented SLA.
When it is not
A ten person office that browses, emails, and runs a few cloud apps does not need a dedicated circuit. Business fiber broadband at a fraction of the price will do the job, and the money saved buys a cheap second connection for failover, which helps uptime more than an SLA does.
The honest answer for a lot of small sites is broadband primary, broadband secondary, different carriers, automatic failover.
Common questions
Is dedicated internet the same as a leased line?
Effectively yes. Leased line is the older term and it is still common outside the US. Carriers here usually say dedicated internet access, DIA, or dedicated fiber.
Does DIA come with static IPs?
Almost always. A small block is standard and larger blocks are available with justification. Business broadband often charges extra for even one.
How much more does DIA cost than broadband?
Several times more at the same headline speed. That gap has narrowed a lot in fiber-rich buildings and it is worth re-quoting if your last look was more than two years ago.