Business broadband vs dedicated internet: which one are you actually on?

'Business internet' is two different products wearing one label, and businesses routinely pay for one while thinking they have the other. Broadband is a shared, best-effort connection. Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) is bandwidth reserved for you with a contractual guarantee behind it.

With broadband — cable or shared fiber — your speeds say 'up to' for a reason. You're sharing capacity with every other business on the node, so a gigabit plan can crawl at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Uploads are a fraction of downloads, and when it breaks, repair is 'next available technician.'

DIA works differently: the bandwidth is yours alone, symmetrical up and down, and backed by an SLA — a service level agreement that commits to uptime (typically 99.9% or better), latency targets, and a repair window measured in hours, often four. Miss the SLA and you get credits.

The price difference is substantial. Broadband typically runs $80–$500/month depending on speed and technology. DIA commonly starts around $300–$800/month for 100 Mbps and climbs past $2,000 for gigabit, plus possible construction fees if fiber needs to be extended to your building. Always ask about build costs before signing a DIA quote — that's where the surprises live.

How to tell which one you're on: look for the words 'dedicated' or 'DIA' and an SLA on your contract or bill. If your plan says 'up to' a speed and there's no uptime guarantee, you're on broadband — regardless of what the salesperson called it.

Which do you need? If downtime costs you real money — card readers, VoIP phones, cloud systems you can't run the business without — DIA earns its premium, especially paired with a cellular failover. If an outage is annoying rather than expensive, good broadband with a cheap 5G backup usually beats an expensive dedicated line.

The mistake we see most: businesses paying near-DIA prices for broadband with a fancy name, or buying DIA when a $70 failover line would have solved their actual problem. A TSI advisor reads your current bill, tells you what you actually have, and quotes the right tier across carriers — free.