When seeking reliable internet connectivity for your business, it’s vital to carefully consider your options. Among the major questions you’ll need to address is this: Are you content with best-effort broadband internet, or are you interested in exploring dedicated business internet?
Broadband internet vs. dedicated business internet
Despite their broad similarity, there are many notable differences between broadband and a dedicated business internet service. You’ll want to understand the fundamentals of each high-speed internet connectivity method and how they differ when deciding what’s best for your organization.
What is dedicated business class internet?
First, let’s address the “dedicated” in dedicated business class internet. When an internet service provider (ISP) offers this service, they’re offering a private internet connection that isn’t shared by anyone else. Only you have access.
Contrast this with broadband internet, which an ISP shares across many organizations. Even though business-level broadband outstrips the quality of residential broadband, corporate customers are still subject to the burden of demand placed on the ISP by its other business clients.
As such, dedicated business class internet has several notable advantages, including:
- Improved performance. Because you don’t share your internet with any other customers, network performance can significantly improve. Also, you avoid your business’s internet being throttled, because you aren’t dealing with the risk of congestion causing network downtime during peak times (as can be the case with broadband customers).
- A more reliable connection. Your network connection is its own exclusive island. That means no fluctuations in bandwidth and vastly increased reliability (thus reducing latency and packet loss) thanks to WiLine’s mesh networking, internet redundancy and route diversity.
- Symmetrical upload and download speeds. With broadband internet, your upload speed can be — and, in fact, almost always is — different from your download speed. This leads to varying performance across different tasks. Dedicated business internet has exactly the same bandwidth for both of these networking activities. For example, a 1 Gbps dedicated business internet speed means 1 Gbps for download and 1 Gbps for upload, ensuring your company’s performance is even throughout independently of the task. This is especially important if — like so many of today’s businesses — you run critical business applications and other services in the cloud.
- A commitment to quality service. ISPs offering dedicated business internet sometimes commit to a service-level agreement (SLA). This dictates that the provider will offer internet connectivity at an agreed-upon level of performance (specified in metrics like latency, jitter, uptime and so on). Falling short means the ISP must somehow compensate the customer for this lapse in performance. While not unheard of among business broadband ISPs, SLAs are not a common feature. These usually address only service availability due to the best-effort nature of the service, whereas they are with a dedicated internet provider like WiLine.
Is dedicated business internet service worth it?
Dedicated business internet is more expensive than broadband internet, at least to begin with. However, that upfront cost can make up for itself fairly quickly by improving your operational productivity and supporting better business opportunities. Also, dedicated internet greatly reduces your risk of experiencing the connection outages and network performance inconsistency that affect broadband providers with more frequency than you can bear, greatly hindering operations, and ultimately contributing to bottom-line losses.
Choosing an internet service provider
No two ISPs offering dedicated business internet services are alike. The ISP you choose for this service is just as important as making the switch to dedicated business internet in the first place. Ask yourself these questions when making a decision:
How is the service delivered? Fixed wireless, fiber or something else?
The type of business internet connection a provider offers determines numerous critical factors, ranging from reliability and latency to the ISP’s mean time to repair when responding to troubleshooting requests.
When contrasting fiber and fixed wireless, the main determinant is the network infrastructure’s placement: either being above or below the ground. The above-ground infrastructure of fixed wireless is inherently easier to access than underground fiber internet, allowing a more rapid response if any issues arise.
In addition, fixed wireless, especially when enhanced by mesh topology, is far more resistant to full-on outages because it simultaneously uses multiple paths to reach the internet including in many instances multiple data centers: If any one node of them experiences downtime, the connection can be instantly and without human intervention rerouted and restored.
How scalable is the provider?
The best business internet providers can deliver dedicated connectivity to any small business, but are also prepared to scale up accordingly if any such organization ultimately grows into a sprawling enterprise. This entails having options for dedicated connectivity across a wide range of speeds, from 50 Mbps to lightning-fast 10 Gbps.
WiLine offers top-of-the-line dedicated internet access for virtually any business
At WiLine, we offer both dedicated fixed wireless internet with internet redundancy, route diversity, SLAs and year-round support as well as wireless broadband internet. Moreover, our services are fully scalable and can meet the connectivity needs of companies ranging from small startups to enterprises.
Check out our business connectivity solutions for yourself and begin exploring the possibilities of a dedicated internet service that confidently matches the evolving requirements of modern businesses.
Upgrade to WiLine's Dedicated Business Internet
