Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) Buyer’s Guide: Features, Options, and Pricing

Does your company operate mission-critical applications out of a data center? Do you have an office with tens of employees where bandwidth, speed and uptime matter?

It’s likely your company is purchasing a Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) circuit (or two) rather than standard best-effort business internet to support such an operation.

Dedicated Internet Access comes with different names and flavors: dedicated fiber (most common - sometimes called dedicated ethernet, fast ethernet, ethernet over fiber), dedicated fixed wireless (can be just as good as fiber nowadays!), and ethernet over copper / T-1 / T-3 for the older school networking folk out there.

The type of DIA available to you depends on provider availability near your location, but nowadays enterprise fiber is nearly ubiquitous in the US and often represents the best bang for your buck.

What Is Dedicated Internet?

The delivery method for both dedicated fiber internet and broadband is the same — fiber-optic cables. Broadband over fiber, however, shares the fiber infrastructure with other users. Dedicated fiber internet does not share, providing you guaranteed bandwidth with a connection that’s provisioned specifically for you, as opposed to a “best effort” connection where you’re sharing bandwidth with other users. 

Further, dedicated fiber — often referred to as dedicated internet access or “DIA” for short — comes with various service level agreements, where the ISP will commit to guaranteeing uptime, bandwidth, latency, jitter, packet loss, and potentially even more. Finally, dedicated fiber will come with improved support resolution paths and timelines relative to broadband. Add all of this up, and you can see why most enterprises opt for dedicated fiber as their primary connectivity option of choice at sites of any importance.

For all of these service concessions, however, dedicated fiber can cost quite a bit more than broadband, and typically requires a 12-month-plus contractual commitment.

Shared vs. Dedicated Internet Access

Shared, or “best effort,” access is usually the most inexpensive option because it’s provided over network infrastructure that numerous ISP customers use. This typically comes in the form of coaxial cable from the cable company and business fiber from the telephone company. However, an issue that some organizations face with shared service is inconsistency. With shared service, you purchase bandwidth at maximum speeds. Depending on internet traffic at different times or on different days, speeds can vary, impacting productivity. This can be an issue if, for example, remote locations routinely share large files with collaborators in other offices.

Dedicated internet service eliminates those problems with consistent, synchronous, and guaranteed bandwidth. A good analogy is comparing DIA to the express lanes on a highway. While merging and exiting vehicles use shared lanes that can become congested with traffic and encounter delays, traffic in the express lane moves freely at consistent speeds — just like dedicated internet access.

Benefits of DIA

Every DIA connection comes with a few key features that justify the big price delta versus a best-effort connection.

Guaranteed Bandwidth

If you purchase a 100 Mbps DIA circuit, you are guaranteed to receive 100 Mbps of bandwidth 100% of the time. Compare this with a 100 Mbps “shared” connection where 100 Mbps is likely the network’s provisioned peak speed and actual speed is typically much lower.

You’ll read that video calling only requires 5 to 10 Mbps download/upload per user to work well, but if your network’s average speed is unpredictable, it’ll be impossible to plan for 20 concurrent video calls. With guaranteed bandwidth, you can plan for peak bandwidth utilization and purchase bandwidth around company uses.

Many DIA providers also build out more robust service delivery architecture and redundancy, and generally engineer for high availability.

Symmetric Bandwidth

With shared connections, your peak download speed may be 100 Mbps, but it’s likely that your peak upload speed is much lower, perhaps 10 Mbps. With DIA, your upload speed will match your download speed.

For companies doing things like video calls, voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP)/unified- communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) calls, or large file transfers, upload speed is important. For data center applications supporting remote work, fast upload is a must.

Throughput Leads to High Connection Quality

Fast bandwidth in a shared connection merely means that your last-mile circuit accesses the ISP backbone network at a certain speed. However, within the ISP’s backbone network, things likely move more slowly because of how the network is provisioned. 

This means your bandwidth might be high (theoretical speed) while your throughput might be low. In many cases, this is due to the provider provisioning a set amount of bandwidth for a dynamic pool of customers. If all the customers in the pool need bandwidth at the same time, or there are more customers added to the pool, there often is not enough bandwidth available.

With DIA, you are provisioned to have a guaranteed amount of bandwidth available to you at all times, so you’ll come much closer to realizing your purchased bandwidth speed. Your internet will ‘feel’ much faster.

Connection “Quality”

Best effort connections not only vary in terms of the amount of bandwidth and throughput available but also the actual quality of the connection. "Quality" metrics are typically measured by latency, jitter, and packet loss. SD-WAN is an excellent tool for measuring this and has shed light on just how often these best effort connections are in flux.

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

When you pay up for DIA, not only will you get all of the features above, but ISPs will actually guarantee many of the facets outlined above over 99% of the time and hold themselves accountable if they don’t deliver. An SLA provided by a vendor on DIA will typically guarantee network uptime, latency, packet loss, and sometimes jitter will meet certain criteria over 99.9% of the time that service is provided. If the ISP breaches its SLA, you are guaranteed remediation in the form of "service credits" and may even be able to get out of your contract.

Vastly Improved Customer Support/Maintenance

With DIA, ISPs often guarantee a response time of less than four hours to a trouble ticket. Also, you will get a dedicated account manager who can help you escalate major issues without having to call a “black hole” customer support line. This is a big part of what you pay for, as shared connections don’t often come with these support guarantees. This metric is known as Mean Time to Respond (MTTR).

Drawbacks of DIA

So why doesn’t everyone get DIA then? What are the drawbacks of getting DIA?

Price

A 100M business broadband connection may cost $100 to $200 per month. The same bandwidth on DIA may cost up to $800 per month. Pricing can vary significantly by provider and location, but the features of DIA warrant a big premium in price versus a service that’s similar to a home cable internet connection. If uptime on your core applications is critical or you’re running an operation with lots of employees in an office, the ROI on solid internet is very easy to justify.

Contract Term

Often, DIA comes with a mandatory two- to three-year contract term, while shared connections often come with shorter terms or are even month-to-month typically. This makes sense, as setting up DIA requires some capital expenditure (capex) from the ISP that may not make sense on a shorter contract term. However, there are exceptions. Pilot Fiber, a regional ISP, offers DIA with a flexible month-to-month term.

Installation Interval

If your local cable company is “on-net” at your building, you should be able to get a shared connection up and running in less than a week. DIA is more complicated. Because DIA installation necessitates truck rolls, provisioning, and equipment installation, best-case install intervals are 20 to 30 days, and average intervals are 60 to 120 days. If you need DIA at a site, you have to plan early.

Who Needs Dedicated Internet Access?

There are several indicators that a business will benefit from upgrading from shared service to dedicated internet access, such as:

• A large number of employees who use the internet

• Business activities that include a high volume of uploading and downloading

• Mission-critical business activities that require internet uptime for functionality (payment processing, real-time data transmission, model training, etc.)

• Large operations that rely on cloud-hosted applications and VoIP / video conferencing communication

• Business activities that communicate back and forth from a data center

Businesses in a broad range of markets and industries can improve their workflows and productivity with dedicated internet access. For example, DIA is vital for call centers with cloud-based phone systems. It’s also essential to e-sports and online gaming where reliable, consistent service is non-negotiable.

Dedicated internet access is also essential for omnichannel retailers that do business online, coordinate operations with supply chain partners, count on real-time inventory information across the organization, and prioritize providing optimal experiences to build customer loyalty and revenues.

Healthcare systems with multiple facilities and primary care partners will benefit from DIA’s guaranteed bandwidth that enables reliable access to mission-critical data, facilitates collaboration, and makes it easier for patients to connect with healthcare providers.

Collaborative teams in video production, software development, and engineering will also see ROI through an enhanced ability to upload large files or high volumes of data and streamlined communications.

When Should a Business Upgrade?

It’s also worth noting that for some companies, the move to dedicated internet service will make better business sense as they grow. DIA is generally more expensive than shared service, with costs that range from $60 to $600 for the most basic shared plans and $500 to $9,000 for dedicated services, depending on bandwidth and construction cost. 

Small and medium-sized (SMB) businesses that aren’t experiencing a loss of productivity or efficiency on shared internet service may not see ROI from upgrading to DIA. However, when the company expands to new locations or increases the size of its workforce, the gains in efficiency and productivity that dedicated internet access delivers can far outweigh the cost.

Transitioning to DIA and the costs you will incur may also depend on an evaluation from your ISP, especially if they’ll need to invest in connecting you to an existing network or bring DIA service to your area to accommodate you. Not all buildings have the proper infrastructure to support these dedicated connections, so it can be expected that the construction costs paid by the carrier to bring these buildings “on-net” will be amortized by the bank and billed as part of your monthly recurring charge. 

Increasingly, some professionals are considering residential DIA; however, be prepared for your residence to undergo that same evaluation from the provider before they commit to providing you with that service.

Dedicated Internet Cost

See below for a chart summarizing average costs, the highest cost observed, and the lowest cost observed across various bandwidth tiers from a DIA pricing guide we released in 2023.

A few observations are worth noting here.

Best effort connectivity is pretty cheap. This is expected. For those unaware, “best effort” connections are your typical broadband connections where the bandwidth quoted is a non-guaranteed best case.

Dedicated connections cost a lot more (which makes sense, as they mean real capex and higher support expenses from the provider), but also differ quite a bit in price as you go up in bandwidth. However, you’ll notice that the price doesn’t scale with bandwidth. The 500Mbps average price is less than double that of 100Mbps, and the 10Gbps price is ~2.5x that of 1Gbps.

The high and low observations are abnormal cases and should not be expected, but it is good to know that there is a huge variance in what you’ll see. As a guide, any DIA circuit at 100 Mbps or above at less than $500/month is not a bad price. Factors that’ll influence local pricing at a specific location will be provider competition (DCs with lots of providers, for example, tend to see cheaper pricing), cost of construction (lit buildings are always cheaper), and the provider itself. Comcast and Verizon tend to be on the expensive side in almost all cases, while providers like Pilot are cheap wherever they’re on-net.

Dedicated Internet Access Pre-Procurement Checklist

Here are the questions you should ask yourself before reaching out to your telecom provider or agent.

What Are Your Bandwidth Requirements?

Feels like a no-brainer, but it’s paramount that you accurately define your bandwidth requirements when procuring a DIA circuit.

Your telecom provider or agent can assist in this calculation, but it’s good to have an idea of your needs going into the sales discussions; this will help you avoid under- or overestimating your bandwidth requirements (both of which can be costly):

• Overestimating your bandwidth requirements (aka buying a 1 Gbps DIA circuit when you really need 500 Mbps) is costly for obvious reasons; it will result in your business paying for excess bandwidth that you do not need.

• Underestimating your bandwidth requirements can be even more costly due to business inefficiencies caused by a clogged network (see our post on the ROI of a high-speed network for more detail there). And, unfortunately, if you realize post-installation that you require more bandwidth, you’ll need to initiate a service upgrade with your provider, which comes at an additional cost (both time and money).

To estimate your bandwidth requirements, you need to know all of the applications and services your DIA circuit will be supporting and the bandwidth requirements of each. These requirements will vary depending on where you are accessing your applications from: public cloud, private cloud, or locally. You also need to take into account what your users are doing on those applications and what the application use cases are.

While the question is nuanced, here’s some simple math to estimate bandwidth needs for a single office location. First, determine whether or not most of your network uses fall into “low bandwidth” or “high bandwidth” activities. If primarily “low” bandwidth (i.e. internet browsing, social media usage, email), multiply the number of users on the network by three for a reasonable estimate of Mbps needed. If primarily “high” bandwidth uses (i.e. large file downloading/uploading (or cloud backup), video calling), multiply the number of users by 10.

For obvious reasons, the more applications and connected devices your circuit is supporting, the more complicated this calculation will be.

It’s recommended that you estimate your bandwidth needs and review them with your service provider when procuring. 

What Service Level Agreement (SLA) Do You Require?

Your service level agreement or SLA is a contract with your ISP that guarantees the availability of your network (in terms of 99%-plus uptime) and the connection quality of your circuit (in terms of packet loss, jitter, latency, and Mean Time to Respond or MTTR).

It’s important to note that, no matter how high your SLA percentage is, downtime will inevitably still occur at some point during the life of your contract. When your SLA is broken (aka downtime occurs), you will be compensated via service credits — which is a huge benefit and differentiator of dedicated internet circuits. The catch is that you, the customer, are responsible for tracking and seeking remedies from the provider for broken SLAs. Additionally, some SLAs exclude issues that occur over the last mile (which is where the majority of problems typically happen).

For those reasons, you should be ready to talk about the providers’ SLA terms and downtime track record when going into your DIA procurement discussions.

As mentioned above, an SLA does not necessarily guarantee network uptime; the SLA guarantees remedies in the case of downtime. This is why redundancy exists.

What Is Your Cost of Downtime and What Are Your Redundancy Requirements?

Network downtime is inevitable. Internet outages can be caused by several factors, including adverse weather, equipment failure, service provider network interruptions, human error, and cyberattacks. And, it’s probably not news to you, but network downtime is expensive.

For these reasons, it is recommended that every enterprise has redundancy in their network. Network redundancy comes in a few forms: circuit/provider, geographic/network, and physical diversity.

• Circuit/provider: It’s recommended that enterprises procure a secondary circuit to sit behind their primary circuit to take over in the event of an outage at the circuit or provider level (this can be a second DIA connection or even a broadband, satellite, or 5G connection).

• Geographic/network: Implementing geographic diversity across your network/providers and ensuring that your internet providers’ peering relationships differ from each other are important for guaranteeing uptime. That way, if one provider’s network is down due to a localized event, your network will have a separate backbone to rely on.

• Physical: Physical diversity refers to the path the actual fiber or copper takes to reach your location. If your primary and secondary circuits both run through the same building entry point (BEP) or minimum point of entry (MPOE), it is more likely that an accidental fiber cut or weather event could wipe out both of your circuits due to the concentration of the network.

If your enterprise has a very high cost of downtime, you should likely secure a secondary DIA circuit from a different provider than your primary circuit and ensure that the circuits are physically diverse. If your cost of downtime isn’t very high, you could likely get by with a broadband secondary circuit.

If you aren’t sure how downtime might impact your business, read our post on the potential impacts of downtime next.

Do You Need Static IPs? How Many?

Every device on the internet is assigned a unique IP address, and most business applications require static IP addresses. Static IPs are sold in “blocks” (i.e. /28 or “dash 28”), where the name corresponds to the number of usable IPs in the block. Going into your procurement discussions, you should have an idea of how many usable IPs you require.

Additionally, be aware that carriers require justification for large IP blocks due to IPv4 address exhaustion. If you only need a /29 or /28, you don’t need to worry about your ability to procure static IPs. If you require a /27 or larger block, you’ll need to address the request with your carrier pre-sale. Most carriers require justification for a /27 or larger request, and some carriers are stingier than others.

What Contract Length Do You Want/Need?

Telecom services are typically structured as annual or multi-year contracts that are billed monthly. Before reaching out to carriers, you should have an idea of what contract term length you are comfortable with (36 months is standard). Typically, the longer the term, the more favorable the monthly pricing; most carrier pricing gets cheaper as you increase your term up to 60 months (but, fun fact, AT&T always provides their best pricing on 24-month terms).

Say you are a startup opening your first office space, even if the monthly cost is more attractive, you might be better off committing to a three-year contract than a five-year contract. This will help you avoid costly cancellations in the event that your startup isn’t in business five years from now.

Canceling your service prior to the contract termination is a challenge and expensive. You’ll almost always be hit with an early termination fee which requires you to pay 85% to 100% of the cost of the circuit for the remainder of the term. The only way you can avoid paying an early termination fee is if your provider’s performance has been absolutely atrocious (i.e. three outages of over an hour within a 30-day period).

When Do You Need the Circuit Installed By (Installation Interval)?

Before speaking with providers, you should know when you need your services installed, understanding that it is not uncommon for install intervals to slip. The standard installation interval for an on-net DIA circuit is typically within 15 to 45 days. The standard installation interval for an off-net circuit is 60 to 120 days and can be quite unpredictable as most carriers aren’t doing true due diligence on what it’s going to take to install off-net until after the order is signed.

Does Your DIA Provider Matter?

Not really. At this point, internet access is somewhat of a commodity and most provider offerings are quite similar. There are two dynamics to note here.

First, local availability dictates who you can use. Unless a provider is “on-net” or “lit” at your building or data center, getting inside will result in you getting charged (likely expensive) construction fees that you probably wouldn’t want to pay. In most cases, you’re best off working with the providers already in the building.

Second, even the largest providers differ by region. Spectrum may tout a deep fiber network in the Northeast while operating an old, poorly maintained fiber network in the Midwest. Some providers may lease transport from others in certain locales. Just knowing the specific providers you’re picking from won’t necessarily tell you much.

When making a purchase, don’t compare providers, compare on factors that matter: price, SLA, install interval, transport (fiber or copper, their own or leased), and speed.

How To Purchase DIA

Once you have settled on DIA, you will need to do the following to purchase the service:

• Determine your location.

• Evaluate contract length and stipulations.

• Reach out to providers and work out the details.

• Prepare for the installation interval.

You may also benefit from enlisting the help of a company like Lightyear who can help you navigate the process :)