Many Flavors of Business Internet

By: John Shepler

You need to connect your business to the Internet. In fact, it’s almost impossible to do business now without a broadband Internet connection. Your customers, your cloud services, your emergency backup, your suppliers and perhaps the connection to your home office, remote sites or franchisees are all via the Internet. The only question is how to best achieve that connectivity.

Most businesses don’t have a lack of options for getting Internet service. What they have is a confusing situation with may different services offering different characteristics at different price points. Choosing the lowest price option may result in frustration when the connection can’t support your particular business activities. Automatically picking the highest priced option can increase your internet costs significantly and may also not provide the connectivity you need. Let’s see if we add some clarity to this decidedly unclear situation.

Business Internet options generally fall within two categories. The first are telecom services, usually regulated and tariffed. These were the first connections invented and adopted by business as well as the carriers themselves. The other category includes information services that are were primarily designed to serve the consumer market but now available for businesses too.

Telecom services include familiar names such as T1 lines, DS3, SONET fiber optic services and the newer Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber connections. These are almost always intended for commercial and large organizational use. Most carriers won’t even provision these services to residences. That’s seldom a problem, because these telecom services range from several times to an order of magnitude higher in price than what residential users are used to spending.

What do you get for your telecom dollar? These services almost always offer symmetrical, dedicated bandwidth with a service level agreement (SLA). The service level agreement specifies the technical characteristics of your line service, the expected availability and how fast problems get attention and repaired. It’s a type of guarantee that you’ll get top rate performance.

Dedicated bandwidth means that you have exclusive use of the bandwidth you are paying for. You have access to a certain number of Mbps or Gbps on a 24/7 basis. You can run traffic occasionally or load up the line to full capacity continuously. The price is the same. It’s your bandwidth and nobody else gets access.

Symmetrical means that you get the same bandwidth in both the upload (transmit) and download (receive) directions. This isn’t important if you are just browsing websites, but it can be critical if you are running a server, backing up files to a remote data center, using cloud computing services, video conferencing or VoIP telephone.

Consumer oriented services are also referred to as “information services.” This is intended to imply that they are not a guaranteed telecom service and offered on a more casual basis. That basis means “best effort” delivery. The providers will make a good faith effort to ensure that you have reliable bandwidth service, but there are no guarantees of performance.

Typical services that fall into this category are DSL, Cable broadband, WiFi hot spots, 3G and 4G wireless and consumer oriented satellite service. Beyond the best effort delivery, what helps to hold the cost down is the use of shared asymmetrical bandwidth.

Shared means just that. There is a pool of bandwidth to connect to the Internet that is shared among dozens or hundreds of simultaneous users. How much you get at any given moment is determined by how many other users are online to divide up that bandwidth pool.

Asymmetrical means that your download and upload speeds are different. Typically, you get several to a order of magnitude (10x) faster speed on download that upload. Why? It’s because most Internet users are accessing web pages or streaming video. These are primarily one way activities. You need the extra bandwidth for those large file transfers from the server on the Internet to your PC.

There are some factors that muddy the waters. The consumer oriented services have business equivalents that are basically the same service but installed at commercial than residential addresses. They are often 2x to 3x the cost for business users. You do get better customer service and, often, the option for static IP addresses if you need them to run a server. Most consumer services prohibit running servers or sharing the bandwidth, such as offering a free WiFi hotspot.

So are these lower cost services something to avoid? Not at all, if they meet your needs. Even home broadband can be highly reliable and quickly repaired if the line is cut or equipment fails. It’s not unusual to get higher bandwidths, as high as 50 or 100 Mbps download and 5 to 10 Mbps upload, for roughly the same cost as a 1.5 Mbps T1 or 3 Mbps EoC line. If most of what your employees do is use email and web browsers or view video clips, you’ll likely get faster speeds for everyone with cable broadband than even bonded T1 lines. Sometimes wireless is all that will work at your location. In that case, a 3G or 4G cellular broadband can save the day when there are no wireline services available.

On the other hand, if you are running enterprise applications, especially in the cloud, or have converted your entire telephone system to VoIP, you’re not going to be very happy with the lower end services. The variability in bandwidth, latency and jitter will drive you crazy and drive your customers crazy as well. You’ll be much better off with dedicated symmetrical bandwidth. In fact, you may well want a direct connection to your cloud service provider or between business locations rather than deal with the vagaries and security issues of the Internet. Many companies need both: dedicated private line service for internal operations and an Internet connection to reach customers and access data.

How do you sort through the myriad of options for business Internet and private line option? Get help from a bandwidth brokerage service that can give you a range of options and the consulting support to make the most effective choices for your business. Find business bandwidth options and prices instantly online now.

3 Types of Clouds You Should Know About

You’ve heard the buzz and have started thinking that you might be missing something by not moving your IT services to the cloud. To help you with that decision, we’ll take a look at the 3 basic types of clouds available and some of the applications that make sense to be cloud-based.

It seems like just about everybody is in the cloud business these days. They are basically offering their own versions of 3 different cloud architectures. These are the public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud. All of the different cloud services run on one or more of these cloud models.

The most popular and prevalent type of cloud is the public cloud. This is a special purpose data center owned and operated by a cloud service provider who seeks to provide services to many paying customers simultaneously. The cloud data center is the type of data center we’d all like to have, but few can afford. It is in a large secure facility with fire suppression and a couple of layers of backup power. There are multiple fiber optic lines connecting to the outside world for redundancy.

In fact, redundancy is a key to successful cloud operations. One of the key selling features is reliability. In fact, many business oriented cloud companies offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that define the uptime you can expect, how fast service will be restored in the rare event it is lost, and what compensation you’ll receive for not having your cloud service available. These SLAs are similar to what telecom carriers offer and distinguish enterprise level cloud providers from consumer type services.

Redundancy means multiple everything. That includes servers, batteries, diesel generators, Ethernet switches, routers, wireline connections, environmental control, and staffing. Any decent cloud company has a full time technical staff ready to address issues around the cloud.

The companion to redundancy is virtualization. This is the real magic behind the cloud. Virtualization became popular with IT departments because so many applications don’t use the full capacity of the server. They either run at a fraction of the maximum throughput or occasionally burst to more than the server can handle. By connecting multiple physical servers in a virtualized environment, each application can take the resources it needs at any given moment without hogging an expensive server that mostly idles. The load can be spread among multiple physical servers automatically to handle peak loads.

In fact, this is how you can build the second type of cloud yourself. Set up your own data center as a virtualized environment of servers, storage and WAN connections and you can provide computing for your entire organization including remote business locations.This is the private cloud. You own it. You maintain it. You keep all the resources for yourself.

Economy of scale suggests that public cloud with multiple tenants are going to cost you less than running your own private could. You may want to go with the private option anyway when you have high security requirements or heavy regulatory compliance requirements. The other reason is if you have a unique environment that requires specialized hardware, software or operating systems.

A fairly new wrinkle is the private cloud in the public data center. In this case, the cloud service provider sets up a fully dedicated infrastructure that serves only your needs. It is not interconnected with the public cloud facilities. An advantage of this approach is that you can maintain the privacy of having your own cloud without the capital investment and maintenance headaches of ownership.

The third type of cloud is called the hybrid cloud. It is a combination of private and public clouds. For instance, you may use a public cloud for many of your applications but keep a smaller private cloud in-house for your most sensitive or proprietary functions. You can decide how much cross-connection occurs so that the private and public clouds can share information. You may even want a cloud service company to create a hybrid cloud for you using their public cloud infrastructure and special facilities for your dedicated private cloud.

Are you still scratching your head trying to decide what, if any, cloud services make sense for your company? Get free consulting advice and a wide range of competitive quotes for enterprise level cloud services now.

Hosted Network Monitoring Services

Metro and Wide Area Networks are becoming more and more important to businesses. The steady migration toward electronic transactions, online services and cloud storage & computing are making networks a critical part of the business infrastructure. That, in turn, is making networking monitoring a necessary function in every IT department. It breaks down to doing it yourself or contracting with a provider to monitor the network.

Companies have been monitoring their own LANs since they started installing networks. It’s logical to extend that philosophy to include any telecom links between facilities. That includes point to point networks and both public and VPN connections to the Internet. There are good reasons to rethink this approach now. Let’s have a look at how the networking monitoring processing can be improved.

One area of weakness is networks used by smaller businesses. A lot of factories, offices and retail outlets aren’t open or staffed around the clock. What’s going on in the wee hours? Who knows? A construction crew could be working late and cut through the cable that is your last mile connection. The alarm lights on the terminal equipment illuminate, but there is no one around to take action. You come in to open up in the morning and find that you have no network connection. You report it, of course, and the carrier will start the investigation process. You may or may not be back in business by noon. That’s only if you have a good SLA (Service Level Agreement) or a very proactive service provider.

There are measures you can take. You can set up a process to monitor the alarms and ping remote servers periodically to make sure the link is still up. If something goes wrong, you can have it send you or someone on-call in your IT department a text message. Somebody sill has to be awake enough to get the alert and then start working the problem. That involves figuring out if the outage in on the telecom link or in your equipment and contacting the right party to get some corrective action.

Large companies with 24/7 coverage of their data centers and other IT assets may consider this part of their charter. Small and medium companies, especially those with branch offices and critical e-commerce infrastructure, may have the need for faster response but not the budget to provide “just in case” staffing. These are the companies that hosted network monitoring services work wonders for. With hosted monitoring, the responsibility of what’s happening beyond your network’s edge belongs to the service provider. They do have the automated equipment and round-the-clock staffing to keep an eye on every network link to make sure that it is working properly.

In most situations, the network edge is a managed router installed by the service provider. This equipment terminates the line with the proper interface, be it T1, DS3, EoC, EoF or SONET. The other side of the router is where you connect, generally with an Ethernet interface. The router itself is considered “in the loop” as far as network monitoring and testing is concerned. If anything goes wrong, the provider has the ability to test functionality through all their equipment and lines, right on up to your Ethernet connection.

In some cases, you even have the option of letting the service provider include your internal local network within their networking monitoring service. You decide whether to let them have access to the entire network or just a portion. This is the ultimate level of support for smaller companies that have little or no on-site IT staffing.

A particularly robust network security solution is provided by MegaPath, a major facilities-based carrier. MegaPath goes far beyond just monitoring to ensure the network is “up.” They include comprehensive Unified Threat Management (UTM) to implement network security. This involves an advanced firewall, intrusion prevention, anti-virus and anti-spam filtering, web application control and data loss prevention. Network management involves deep packet inspection and uptime monitoring that monitors for latency, jitter, delays and packet loss. It is sometimes difficult for even larger companies to provide this depth of networking monitoring and security.

Are you interested in better management of your network connections at a reasonable cost? You should look into hosted network monitoring and security services suitable for the size of your business and criticality of your network.

3 Mbps to 6 Mbps Bonded Internet Access

Business Internet access is critical to communicating with customers and perhaps taking and fulfilling orders. You want rock solid stability and decent bandwidth, but at a price that won’t break the bank. Here’s a look at how you can incrementally increase your Internet connection speed to match your business activity.

Not that long ago, you had a couple of choices for dedicated Internet access. You could get a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps or move up to a T3 line (DS3 bandwidth) at 45 Mbps. There really wasn’t anything in-between. Shared bandwidth services offer a larger range of choices, but shared bandwidth means variable performance and assurance of availability. You also have to contend with asymmetrical speed, where download line speed is 10x the upload line speed.

Dedicated Internet access, like T1 and T3, offers symmetrical bandwidth that is the same for both upload and download, a fixed line speed that doesn’t vary, and high availability with a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The one issue is cost, especially when you need more than what a T1 line can provide but not the full capacity of a T3 line.

Sometimes you can get what’s called a fractional line service. The service provider installs a full capacity line, but rate limits your bandwidth. The result is referred to a fractional T3 or fractional DS3 service. It saves some money over the full service level but isn’t that great of a deal on a per Mbps cost basis.

A better option today is to order bonded line service to increase your bandwidth. Bonding is an industry standard for connecting multiple lines of the same type to combine their bandwidths. For instance, you can bond two T1 lines together and get 3 Mbps instead of 1.5 Mbps. The view from your router is one larger bandwidth service rather than juggling two separate lines. That bonding process takes place within the Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) that is installed by the service provider.

Bonding is a great way to increase your bandwidth incrementally, but there are a couple of things to consider. First, you can’t just go out and buy a second T1 line from just anybody. You have to get your bonded lines from the same carrier. Remember that it is the service provider who does the bonding through equipment at both ends of the line.

Also, the cost goes up by the same increment as the bandwidth. In other words, two T1 lines cost twice as much as one T1 line. There is no economy of scale. That’s no big deal if you are happy with doubling your line speed and your cost versus have to pay 10x the price to move up to the next standard line speed increment of T3. However, this technique does get less attractive with the more lines that you bond in.

Yes, you can go beyond double bonded T1. Bond three T1 lines for 4.5 Mbps, four lines for 6 Mbps, 5 lines for 7.5 Mbps, 6 lines for 8 Mbps, 7 lines for 9.5 Mbps or 8 T1 lines to get 11 Mbps. By the time you get 8 T1 lines bonded, the cost may be approaching what you’d pay for 45 Mbps T3 and you’d have a lot higher line speed.

There is an alternate bonded line service that may give you more bandwidth for less money. This is Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Like bonded T1, EoC uses multiple wire pairs to transport the signal. Providers will bond 2, 4, 6 or 8 pair to increase the speed of Ethernet over Copper service. Unlike T1, EoC offers a much wider range of available bandwidth options. For the price of a T1 line, you can get 2 or 3 Mbps EoC. Other speed options include 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 and 45 Mbps. Cost per Mbps actually decreases as you order higher bandwidth levels.

The one limitation of Ethernet over Copper is availability. It is a newer service and not all central offices are equipped to provide this line service. Also, EoC is highly distance sensitive. You need to be close to your CO to get the highest speeds. Otherwise you may top out at 10 or 15 Mbps. That’s still about the best you can do with bonded T1 and for considerably less cost.

Are you looking for a rock solid connection to the Internet to support your business activities. If so, check availability and pricing for bonded T1 and EoC dedicated Internet access options.

Why T1 Is Available Where Other Line Services Aren’t

If your businesses is located off the beaten path, you may have experienced the frustration of not being able to get the same network services offered to companies downtown. You might even have come to the conclusion that there’s really nothing available to you. Oh, but there one highly reliable and reasonably priced digital telecom service that you can get almost anywhere. What is it? It’s T1.

There are a couple of misconceptions about T1 that go back to when this was something of an exclusive service. They are that T1 lines are very expensive and only available in certain areas. Neither of those is true any longer. T1 lines are available for most every business location. T1 lines are also quite reasonably priced for businesses, although not competitive with or available as residential services.

The fact that you can get T1 and not some of the “bargain” services like DSL and Cable broadband may actually be to your advantage. Those lower cost services have lower prices not because of any special technology, but because they are shared rather than dedicated bandwidth and because they are offered as “information services” with no particular guarantees of availability. Your bandwidth can vary all over the place and if the line goes down, it will get fixed when it gets fixed. T1 lines come with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guarantees such things as bandwidth, jitter, latency and mean time to repair.

Why would anyone buy a low budget information service instead of a professional grade telecom service? In some cases, it’s because the person placing the order isn’t all that familiar with the differences between bandwidth services and goes for the lowest price option available. In other cases, it’s because the service is being used to power a free WiFi hotspot as a service to visiting customers or for casual Internet activities that aren’t all that critical to the daily operation of the business.

T1 is so universally available because it is a highly mature technology, originally developed by the phone companies to transport two dozen phone calls at a time between switching offices. As such, it was designed to use two pair of twisted copper wires as part of a multi-pair bundle installed into nearly every business. Some of the wires in the bundle are used for phone service essential to any business. Others can be used to provide T1 line service.

T1 was also engineered with optional regenerator boxes that could be installed every mile or so to clean up and boost the signal to extend its range. This way, T1 lines can be run far out into the countryside with the same performance as those in town. That’s not so for DSL and Cable, which are pretty much constrained within the city limits and not much further.

T1 is a highly versatile line service. You can use it for dedicated Internet access, multiple telephone line trunks or as a point to point dedicated private line. It’s possible to get T1 private lines that span the nation. In this case, the are multiplexed onto long haul fiber optic circuits for most of that distance and only delivered as copper at both ends of the run.

T1 lines give you 1.5 Mbps of rock-solid exclusive bandwidth in both the upload and download directions. You don’t have to contend with any other users when you want access to the line. Prices start at under $300 a month in many locations nationwide. In lesser populated areas, the prices will be higher due to the extra effort install all the needed equipment, including regenerators, to your location.

What if 1.5 Mbps isn’t enough? You have to option to bond multiple T1 lines together to get a single larger bandwidth service. If you double bond, that is use 2 T1 lines, your bandwidth will be 3 Mbps. The number of lines you can bond together varies with location, but 10 to 12 Mbps is a practical limit in most locations. That’s plenty for most business needs.

Now that you know that T1 lines are very likely available to you at reasonable cost, how about getting T1 line service pricing and options for your business location? It sure beats having to move just because you didn’t think you could get connected.

Internet Wholesale Bandwidth Options

There are two types of organizations that buy Internet bandwidth. Most are end users. They want the access for their employees. The others are resellers. They take large Internet connections and divvy up the bandwidth to hundreds or thousands of individuals and businesses. These are Internet Service Providers (ISPs) looking to buy at wholesale and sell at retail.

The largest networks in the world, called Tier 1, don’t purchase Internet access. They are part of the core network itself. Those major world wide networks exchange traffic on basis of equals called peering. Each network gets as much traffic as it sends to the others, so all benefit and no money is exchanged.

Everyone else has to get to the Internet by accessing one of these Tier 1 networks. The next level down, the Tier 2 networks, are also very large Internet service providers. Since they don’t have the enormous global traffic to participate in peering, they purchase what is called IP Transit. This is Internet access sold on a per Megabit per second per month basis.

Smaller Tier 3 networks can purchase IP Transit from Tier 2 networks, if they are large enough to have an assigned AS or Autonomous System number (ASN) to identify them as part of the Internet. Large scale ISPs fall into this category as well as some large corporations and other organizations.

Local and regional Internet Service Providers, including WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers), buy DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. DIA connections are like point to point private lines, except that one end connects to the Internet. Other private line characteristics still apply. The bandwidth provided is completely dedicated to the ISP and not shared with anyone else. There are generally SLAs or Service Level Agreements that spell out characteristics such as maximum latency, jitter and packet loss as well as time to respond to outages and time to make repairs.

Dedicated also means that there are no extra charges for heavily loading the line. You can use the entire capacity of the circuit in both directions or only some of it. The price is the same.

The smallest DIA service is usually a T1 line running at 1.5 Mbps. This is a symmetrical service, meaning 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download. Usually the download path is much heavier loaded than the upload path for typical Internet access. If fact most consumer Internet access is sold with 5x to 10x higher speeds on download than upload. For business users, upload speeds can be important when transferring large files to remote backup sites and servers within colocation centers.

Obviously, T1 lines can’t serve a large user base but they work great for WiFi hotspots and rural or subdivision WISP service where signed-up customers number in the dozens, not hundreds. A nice feature of T1 lines is that they can be bonded by adding more lines to double, triple and quadruple bandwidth up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. The other nice feature of T1 lines is that they are available where other line services don’t reach. If you can get business telephone system into a facility, you can probably get T1 DIA service.

The next increment in traditional telecom bandwidth is DS3, also called T3 lines. This service runs at 45 Mbps which is large enough for a good size service provider to offer competitive bandwidth. Beyond that, SONET fiber optic services include OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps and OC48 at 2.5 Gbps are very popular.

A strong competitor to T-Carrier and SONET bandwidth is Carrier Ethernet. It comes in two flavors, Ethernet over Copper (EoC) typically from 1 to 50 Mbps and Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps. In a some metropolitan areas, you can also get EoFW or Ethernet over Fixed Wireless at DS3 and Fast Ethernet speeds. Where available, Carrier Ethernet tends to have considerably better pricing than other services.

Do you resell Internet access to other ISPs or end users? If so, see if you can get better wholesale pricing on Dedicated Internet Access and IP Transit services.

Dedicated Bandwidth vs Cable

There are a couple of good but quite different approaches to business Internet connectivity. One is dedicated bandwidth, as exemplified by T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper. The other is Cable broadband. Let’s take a look at what each has to offer and how you would pick the right service for your business.

Small and medium size businesses that pick dedicated bandwidth services do so either because there is no shared bandwidth service readily available or because they value the consistency and service level agreements provided by the dedicated telecom providers. Companies that choose Cable broadband do so because they get a lot of bandwidth for a relatively small price. Cable BB is an established service that has been proven in years of service to residential and business users. The service availability is generally quite good, especially during business hours, and the low prices may be more important than service guarantees.

It’s important to note the definition of the term “dedicated” in this context. It doesn’t mean working extra hard like, say, a dedicated employee. What dedicated means is that a certain amount of bandwidth is reserved or dedicated to your exclusive use. If you order a T1 line, you can count on having 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download capability available at all times. There is no such thing as overage charges or fair use policies. You can load that T1 line up to the limit and run it that way all month. You’ll be charged the same as if you lightly used the service during business hours and let it idle overnight.

Cable broadband is sold on a different basis. First of all, the bandwidth is shared not dedicated. You’ll notice that Cable bandwidth is specified as “up to” 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and so on. At any given moment you may experience the full bandwidth or a small fraction of it. Why? It’s the sharing involved. What Cable companies do is lease large dedicated bandwidth circuits and then divvy that bandwidth up among their subscribers. The chunk allocated to your area may be shared by dozens or hundreds of other users. Whether or not that makes a difference depends on what you are doing on the Internet and what others on the same service are doing.

Cable broadband is designed to match the expected activities of the typical Internet user. You know that when you are looking something up online, you first query a search engine. Then you read through the first page or two of listings deciding on what site to visit. Finally, you select a site and it downloads in your browser. You may quickly go to visit another page on that site or you may spend a minute or two reading what’s on the screen.

Notice that what you were doing was sending out commands from your keyboard, waiting for a page download and then not accessing the Internet at all while you perused the material. That’s why shared bandwidth works. Not everyone is going to be typing on their keyboard or in the midst of a file download simultaneously. While you are reading, someone else can be downloading and vice versa.

This is also the reason why asymmetrical bandwidth works so well for Internet access. Asymmetrical means that upload and download speeds are vastly different. You may order 30 Mbps download with 3 Mbps or 6 Mbps upload and be perfectly satisfied. It only takes a small amount of data from the keyboard to trigger much larger data packages in the form of websites or videos to download.

Dedicated bandwidth services like T1, DS3, EoC, EoF and SONET fiber optic tend to be symmetrical. The upload and download speeds are the same. This is particularly valuable if you are communicating between organizations, sending files back and forth, uploading to a remote server or backing up files. In these cases, upload capacity counts.

The other service that works much better over dedicated rather than shared bandwidth is VoIP telephony. In fact, you are much better off connecting directly to your VoIP service provider with a dedicated T1 line or SIP trunk than using the Internet at all. The Internet offers no class of service controls so your sensitive voice packets can easily get pushed around by someone else’s data packets. That situation is even worse on shared bandwidth access services where your bandwidth varies all over the place.

Is your business in need of Internet access, point to point connections or multi-location connectivity? Check prices on dedicated and shared bandwidth options and get complementary expert advice on what services make the most sense for your business requirements.

Dedicated vs Shared Internet Access

There are fundamentally two types of broadband Internet access. They are shared and dedicated.

You may have been thinking wireless, landline, satellite or fiber optic. Those are delivery technologies that can determine price and availability. But your fundamental decision is whether to go with shared or dedicated Internet access.

What’s the difference? The name pretty much describes the nature of your service. Shared Internet access is something like a buffet. You see that big roast and think that you can fill your plate with meat. But by the time you get to the head of the line, you only get a sliver of beef. “Sorry,” says the chef. “We have to limit portions of this entree because there is so much demand.”

That’s how shared Internet service works. You sign up for what you think is 10 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload. But if you look carefully at the supplier's disclosure, they say that you get “up to 10 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload.” Up to means a maximum, not a minimum or even an average value. In other words, 10 Mbps is the fastest line speed you can ever expect to see and don’t count on seeing it at any particular time.

Why is this the case? It’s the way that the shared Internet connection is organized. The service provider figures that not everyone who signs up for their broadband service will be online simultaneously. Even those who are at their computers aren’t likely to be all downloading huge files at the same time. So they sell that 10 Mbps service to 10, 25 or even 100 different users. If most people are composing email or reading web pages, you’ll have the lion’s share of the bandwidth to yourself. But as soon as one or more users start downloading, that 10 Mbps is divvied up to support as many users who want to use bandwidth at that time.

As you can imagine, the amount of shared bandwidth you have available can vary greatly and will change from minute to minute. If you have an important document to upload or download, you initiate the transfer and take your chances. There’s no guarantee of how long that transfer will take. It might go quickly. It might drag on seemingly forever.

Who puts up with this type of service? Consumers, that’s who. The reason is cost. The provider pays for the 10 Mbps backbone service and divides the cost among the number of users sharing that bandwidth. The price of shared broadband Internet is reasonable for residential users, who rarely are doing anything critical. The worst they experience is streaming audio or video that breaks up, or long delays in accessing their favorite Web sites.

Contrast this situation with dedicated Internet access. Dedicated means just that. The bandwidth you order is dedicated for your use only. You may still experience congestion on the Internet itself, but that 10 Mbps connection to your provider will always run at 10 Mbps.

Most dedicated connections are also symmetrical. That means they run at the same speed in both the upload and download directions. Your 10 Mbps service may be described as 10 x 10 Mbps bandwidth. You get 10 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. That can be very important if you transfer files in both directions. You won’t be slowed down by a lower upload bandwidth.

The other difference between shared and dedicated bandwidth is that dedicated bandwidth is sold as a professional business service. It most often comes with an SLA or Service Level Agreement that describes what service you are ordering and how reliable it is expected to be. If the line goes down for any reason, it gets high priority and should be available again within a certain number of hours.

Shared bandwidth is sold on a “best effort” basis. That means that the carrier will try to keep things running properly, but there are no guarantees as to availability or how long repairs will take. If someone down the street is having service problems, the repair effort might disrupt your service too. That’s just the nature of sharing facilities to save money.

Now you know why home broadband services seem so much cheaper than business grade dedicated Internet access. It comes down to performance and availability. If the Internet is important to your business activities, then you’ll want to check the prices and availability of dedicated Internet access for your location. You may find that prices have come down so much in the last few years that dedicated access is now well within your reach.