Dedicated vs Shared Internet
Recently, a customer needed to move his office and the location. Where he moved didn't provide Comcast Internet as an option. We migrated the account from a 50x10 Comcast connection to a symmetric 5x5 Meg Circuit... he was amazed the 5x5 circuit was as fast if not faster than his 50x10 Comcast connection... he was curious as to, "What is the difference between Dedicated vs Shared Internet?" and this is the answer I gave... I used the picture of the Dan Ryan Expressway being from Chicago to illustrate the point of Dedicated vs Shared Internet. If you look at the left of the picture the lanes are heavily congested. Think of this as a shared internet connection. Shared connections are basic cable connections and even some fiber connections are shared. Shared means all of the companies/connections in the area have to use the same path to get back to the internet point of presence; much like the Dan Ryan during rush hour. Yes, in theory you can drive 55 miles per hour; but if you try to drive your car 55 miles per hour in bumper to bumper traffic, it's not going to work. This is how a cable internet connection works as it is shared by all of the users in the area.
As opposed to a Dedicated Internet connection, in this solution it is as if the express lanes are dedicated only to you for your personal use at any time of the day.. thus you can always go your full speed of 55 miles per hour at any time. A dedicated connection typically will be an Ethernet connection and or fiber (but some fiber connections are shared.) While they appear to have a slower speed, their real throughput is faster than a shared connection which might advertise to be much faster. In addition to the dedicated speed, a Dedicated Internet connection also offers an SLA or Service Level Agreement. This is huge, as a typical Ethernet SLA is a 99.999% up-time. What this means is in a year you should only experience 15 minutes of down time as opposed to a typical cable connection which has no SLA and has a typically down time of 3-5 days per year. Therefore, one needs to ask: how much business do I lose when the internet is down? What is my hourly cost in payroll for every hour the internet is down?
Now you might be asking yourself: which is the best connection for me? Without understanding your specific needs and requirements, that is a difficult question to answer as both types of services exist with a tradeoff of abilities, seeing we have clients which use both types of connections.
Open One Solutions, Inc. is a Chicago based Business VoIP Provider specializing in both cloud / hosted and premised based IP phone systems or IP-PBX solutions. Open One Solutions brings years of experience in this field. Our company founder has been using and deploying cloud / hosted VoIP since 2004 and deploying IP-PBX solutions since the 90’s. For additional information contact us at 312-780-1010 or send us an email at info@openonesolutions.com