So. Why should you opt for dedicated internet access?
Dedicated Internet access isn’t exactly suited for everyone. People who are simply looking to browse Facebook looking at memes or posting pictures of their dinner they’ve cooked onto Instagram will do fine with just a standard broadband connection, even small businesses that only boast a couple of employees would be wise to opt for a cable or DSL service – a lot of the decision for whether a business would benefit from dedicated internet access is done via assessing why and how their business uses the Internet.
To provide an example: a large company that has a plethora of employees would typically choose a dedicated connection through a provider, that’s not to rule out small businesses using them however, as we’ve seen some very small companies that have required a large dedicated line but these businesses were largely internet-based and served applications and large amounts of data to their end users. The main benefit of dedicated internet access is, you guessed it, guaranteed speed and reliability. Unlike standard broadband connections, dedicated internet access comes with guarantees typically 99.9% uptime. If a dedicated line provider fails to meet this guarantee, the business would be entitled to whatever compensation is in the original service agreement.
With standard broadband connections, companies advertise high download speeds that they can’t guarantee and usually compromise with the upload speed, making it significantly lower, this can cause major disruptance in an environment that is heavily based on internet. Whereas dedicated access provides the exact same speed in both directions. Upload is an important aspect for businesses that serve data to their users and even web and email servers utilise upload speeds.
What types of dedicated internet access are there?
This is where it may become confusing for the lesser technologically minded of folks, there are a few different types of dedicated internet access available to consumers, each of them are differentiated by speed and distances. Here is a list of the most common types of access you can recieve from a dedicated line.
- T1/DS1 – T1 is a copper based transmission service, it can transmit your data at speeds of up to 1.5 megabits per second, this type of connection may be bonded together to allow for an even higher level of data transmission. The use of more than one T1 circuit will combine and give the end-user a 3 megabit per second transmission rate.
- T3/DS3 – This type of dedicated internet access is also a copper based service, T3 can transmit data at speeds of up to 45 megabits per second.
- Ethernet – This type of connection, often reffered to as Metro Ethernet, is a copper based service which transmits data to end-users at a rate of 100 megabits per second.
- Fibre – You’ve probably heard of this one somewhere along the line, fibre optic lines use light through wiring and can travel at gigabit speed, this means your data is being transmitted at 1000 megabits per second, this is seriously fast! per second).