"Business internet" describes who the product is sold to; Dedicated Internet Access describes how it is engineered. A business plan on a shared access network divides capacity among subscribers and allocates a small fraction of it upstream. Dedicated Internet Access reserves a fixed, symmetric amount of bandwidth for one organization and carries service commitments written into the agreement. If your operation stops when the connection degrades, that engineering difference is the whole decision.
The confusion here is created by marketing, not by technology. Both products are sold to businesses, both can be delivered over fiber, and both quote a speed. The specification that separates them — whether the capacity is contended — is almost never on the comparison page, because it is the one number that makes the cheaper product look worse.
Understanding the distinction takes about five minutes and saves organizations from the most common connectivity mistake: buying a larger shared plan to solve a problem that shared capacity caused.
| Criterion | Business internet (shared) | Dedicated Internet Access |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity model | Oversubscribed — the same capacity is sold to many subscribers | Reserved — the committed rate belongs to one organization |
| Upstream rate | Typically a small fraction of the advertised download figure | Identical to the downstream rate |
| Advertised speed | "Up to" — a ceiling, not a commitment | A committed information rate |
| Behaviour at peak | Degrades with neighbourhood and regional demand | Unchanged by other subscribers |
| Service commitment | Best-effort; limited or no defined remedy | Availability and response terms in the service agreement |
| Fault handling | Usually begins when you report it | Monitored, with a defined escalation path |
| Static addressing and routing | Often limited or extra | Static IPv4/IPv6 and BGP routing normal |
| Realistic monthly cost | Low — the reason it exists | Materially higher, for materially different infrastructure |
| Latency and jitter | Varies with neighbourhood load; jitter climbs at peak hours | Engineered and stable within the provider network |
| Equipment on site | Provider modem or gateway, frequently self-installed | Managed device at a defined demarcation point |
| Lead time | Days where the access network already passes the building | Weeks, or longer where construction is required |
| Route diversity | One access path; a second is rarely offered | Diverse paths can be engineered where separate routes exist |
An oversubscribed network is designed on the assumption that subscribers will not all draw their maximum simultaneously. That assumption is usually correct, which is why the product works well most of the time and disappoints reliably at the moments when everyone in the area is working. "Up to 1 Gbps" is a statement about the ceiling, not about what is available when you need it.
Backup, hosted applications, video conferencing, camera systems, voice, and site-to-site replication all send data out of the building, and they run concurrently during business hours. Shared products allocate a small share of capacity upstream because residential viewing patterns are download-heavy. The result is a connection that benchmarks well and performs badly, and buying a larger download tier does not touch the problem.
A meaningful commitment specifies availability, a response or repair objective, and a remedy when they are missed. Ask to see the terms — from any provider — and read what triggers the remedy and how it is claimed. A marketing page saying "99.99% uptime" with no corresponding contractual clause is a sentence, not a commitment.
When the consequence of a degraded afternoon is inconvenience rather than stopped work. A small office doing email, browsing, and occasional video is well served by a shared plan, and spending several times more on a dedicated circuit would be waste. The honest test is what stops, not how many employees you have.
This is the difference that shows up on the worst day rather than the best one. A shared business service is supported through a consumer-scale queue: you report a fault, you get a ticket, and the resolution path is largely opaque. A dedicated circuit is a known, monitored path with a defined handoff, so the provider can usually see the fault before you report it and can tell you where it is. Neither model repairs a cut faster than the physical work takes, but only one of them can tell you what is actually wrong.
A shared business plan is designed to need nothing from you: the provider ships a gateway, someone plugs it in, and diagnosis when it misbehaves largely means describing symptoms to a support tier that cannot see your traffic. Dedicated Internet Access moves the boundary. There is a defined demarcation point, the provider monitors up to it, and faults are isolated against a circuit that is supposed to behave a particular way. In exchange, your team owns what sits behind that demarcation — routing policy, firewall capacity, and whatever you have announced if you run BGP. Neither model is less work overall; the difference is whether the work happens during an incident or during design.
Some sites do not justify either decision on its own merits. A four-person satellite office whose applications are all hosted, with no inbound services and no voice, is well served by whatever reliable connection the building already has. A temporary site with a lease shorter than a fiber build cannot wait for construction regardless of what the requirement says. And an organization whose real problem is an undersized firewall or a saturated internal switch will not fix it by buying a larger circuit of either kind — the constraint is not upstream of the building.
For a site where people are working and nothing stops if the connection degrades for ten minutes, shared business internet is a reasonable buy and we will say so. Where the circuit carries voice, hosted line-of-business applications, or anything a customer is waiting on, we recommend dedicated — not because it is faster in the headline sense, but because the number you buy is the number you keep. The honest test is what an hour of degraded service costs, and that number belongs to you rather than to us.
Six questions that settle this choice faster than a feature table. The answer to each one tells you something the specifications do not.
If it stops — order entry, clinical systems, dispatch, card payments — you are buying a service commitment, not a speed. That is the dedicated side of the line.
Backups, video, hosted voice, remote desktop and file sync are upstream loads. Add them up before comparing download headlines, because that is where shared plans run out first.
If the answer is a named response commitment written into an agreement, that is only available on the dedicated side. Shared plans are best-effort by design, not by accident.
If yes, the shared product usually cannot deliver it at all, and the comparison is settled without reference to bandwidth.
Construction timelines beat requirements. Where a build is needed, an interim shared connection is often the pragmatic first step rather than the wrong answer.
Multiply it out honestly. That figure — not the monthly delta between the two products — is the number the decision should turn on.
Broadly, yes — "dedicated line" is older phrasing for the same idea: a circuit whose capacity is allocated to one customer rather than shared. Dedicated Internet Access is the modern term and usually implies fiber delivery with a committed information rate.
Dedicated services exist over several media, but the properties that matter — uncontended capacity and symmetry — are easiest to guarantee over fiber. A "dedicated" service delivered over a shared access medium deserves careful questions about what exactly is dedicated.
Enough that the decision should be made on consequence rather than on price alone, and it varies widely by location and build requirements. We quote per address after an engineering review rather than publishing a rate card, because the build is usually the variable.
Frequently the best answer. A dedicated circuit as the primary path with an inexpensive shared connection as a failover gives you the performance you need and a cheap hedge against a fiber cut, provided the router is configured to fail over cleanly.
Describe what the connection has to carry and where. An engineer will tell you which service actually fits — including when the cheaper option is the right one.
Service availability depends on location, network proximity, capacity, and engineering review. Share an address and we will confirm what can be delivered there.