Resources · Guides

Connectivity Guides

Reference articles for the decisions that come up when buying and operating business connectivity — written to be useful to the person specifying the circuit rather than to the person approving the budget.

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Guides: 12 published
Topics: 4
Format: Answer first, then detail
Written by: A network operator

Buying

How much bandwidth does a business need? Size the circuit from what leaves the building, not what enters it. Add up concurrent upstream demand — hosted applications, video meetings, camera streams at their real bitrate, backup windows, and voice channels — then add roughly 40% headroom. 7 min read
How long does fiber installation take? Where fiber already reaches the building, activation is mostly provisioning and can be quick. Where it does not, the timeline is set by construction: route design, permitting, the build itself, and building access. 6 min read
Is dedicated fiber worth it? Ask what stops when the connection degrades, and for how long. If the answer is inconvenience, shared business broadband is the correct and cheaper purchase. 6 min read
Choosing a provider Compare providers on four things the advertised speed never tells you: whether the rate is committed or a maximum, whether the upstream matches the downstream, what the agreement commits to when the service fails, and who you reach when it does. Everything else — brand, bundled extras, a lower headline price — is secondary to those, and a cheaper quote that differs on any of them is not the same product.. 6 min read
What drives fiber cost Dedicated fiber pricing has two halves that behave differently. The recurring charge tracks bandwidth, term, and route. 7 min read
Multi-site connectivity Multi-site design has two separate questions that get conflated. First, what each site needs to reach the internet. 7 min read

Reliability

Technical

1 Gbps vs 10 Gbps business fiber Most organizations do not need 10 Gbps and cannot use it without upgrading their own equipment. A 10 Gbps circuit makes sense when sustained transfers, large-scale replication, campus aggregation, or research data movement genuinely saturate a gigabit — and when your firewall, switching, and internal cabling can carry it. 6 min read

California

California middle-mile networks explained Middle mile is the regional layer between long-haul backbones and local access networks. It is the reason a community can or cannot get service: a local provider may build fiber down every street and still have nothing affordable to connect it to. 7 min read

More resources

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