Dedicated Internet Access, Bought the Way It Should Be: Providers Competing for You

Dedicated internet access is the product you buy when the connection stops being a convenience and starts being infrastructure. The capacity is yours, upload matches download, and the contract carries consequences when it fails. This hub explains what you are actually paying for and puts the carriers serving your address in competition.

What Dedicated Actually Means

Dedicated internet access, usually shortened to DIA, means the bandwidth you buy is reserved for you end to end rather than shared with other customers in the area. A hundred megabits of DIA is a hundred megabits at nine in the morning and at nine at night, which is not true of a shared service advertising a larger number.

That single property produces the other characteristics buyers associate with DIA. It is symmetric, because there is no reason to favour one direction when the capacity is not contended. It carries a service level agreement, because the provider can commit to something it fully controls. And it is more expensive, because you are paying for capacity that sits idle when you are not using it.

The honest framing is that DIA is insurance, not speed. You are buying predictability under load and a contractual remedy when it fails, and if neither of those matters at a given site then DIA is the wrong purchase for it.

Dedicated Versus Shared, Where It Counts

The difference does not show up on a speed test at a quiet moment. It shows up at the times when everyone is working.

How Much DIA to Buy

Because DIA is uncontended, you can size it against real usage rather than buying headroom to survive contention. That usually means the number is smaller than buyers expect and the money is better spent on the guarantee than on capacity nobody uses.

Size against concurrent demand at your busiest hour, not against a theoretical total. Video meetings, cloud applications and offsite backup are the three that dominate, and backup is the one worth scheduling outside working hours because it is the easiest to move.

Ask about burstable arrangements before settling. Many carriers will provision a larger port and bill a committed rate with the ability to exceed it, which is more flexible than committing to peak capacity permanently. Establish how bursting is measured and billed, because that varies between providers.

Reading a DIA Service Level Agreement Properly

The SLA is the product. If you remove it, DIA is an expensive way to buy bandwidth, so it deserves more attention than the price.

Four numbers matter. Availability, usually expressed as a percentage per month, which sounds impressive until you convert it into minutes. Mean time to repair, which is the commitment that actually governs your bad day. Latency and packet loss guarantees, which are what protect voice and video rather than raw throughput. And the credit schedule, which tells you what a miss is worth.

Then read the exclusions, because that is where agreements differ most. Maintenance windows, force majeure, failures inside your building and problems with equipment you own are commonly carved out. None of that is unreasonable, but you should know the shape of it before an outage rather than during one.

Where DIA Purchases Go Wrong

The most common mistake is buying DIA for a site that did not need it while leaving a genuinely critical site on shared broadband, usually because the critical site was harder to serve. Match the product to the consequence of failure, one site at a time.

The second is treating the SLA as an uptime guarantee rather than a refund policy. A credit worth a portion of one month's fee does not compensate a day of lost operations, so a site that truly cannot stop needs a second circuit, not a stronger agreement on one.

The third is signing a long term at a capacity chosen for today. Ask what upgrading mid-term costs before you sign, because on a circuit that is already installed it is often a configuration change, and knowing that removes the temptation to over-buy at the start.

How the DIA Marketplace Works

Carriers price DIA very differently at the same address depending on whether they are already in the building. Quoting several at once is how that difference becomes visible.

• Tell us the address and capacityServiceability and price are both decided at the building.
• Carriers respond on the same scopeIncluding the ones already lit in your building.
• Compare the SLA, not just the rateRepair times and credits differ more than prices do.

What to Check Before You Sign

DIA contracts are longer and more consequential than shared services. These are the questions worth asking first.

• Is the bandwidth committed or burstable? Establish what you are billed for at rest and what exceeding it costs.
• What is the mean time to repair? Availability percentages matter less than how quickly a fault is fixed.
• How are credits claimed? Automatic or on request, and within what window.
• Are latency and loss guaranteed? These protect voice and video where raw throughput does not.
• What are the exclusions? Maintenance windows and in-building faults are commonly carved out.
• What does a mid-term upgrade cost? On an installed circuit it is often configuration rather than construction.
• Is the last mile owned or wholesaled? If wholesaled, support runs through two companies and repair times reflect that.
• What is the early termination charge? On long DIA terms this is substantial. Know it before you need it.

Dedicated internet access, answered