Many times, not fully understanding telecommunications causes buyers to get frustrated and make choices that aren’t best for their goals. One of the mistakes that we frequently see are buying multiple cable or FiOS circuits instead of paying for Ethernet. It’s hard to explain the difference between Two 100M x 10M circuits from Spectrum and a 20M Ethernet circuit.

 

Have you wondered or had to try and explain the difference between a FiOS circuit and a 100M Dedicated Internet connection to folks at the C Level? If you need help making that discussion clearly and succinctly, contact us.

 

Shared Internet just means that there is an aggregation point shared by you and your neighborhood before you get to larger IP router. Most speed tests don’t show how much throughput you have because they’re based on an average of packet transmission speed. This can very in two hours when all the kids in the neighborhood are streaming Netflix or playing Pokemon.

 

Dedicated Internet is provisioned as a layer 2 physical circuit between your site and your carriers Internet Gateway. This is a much more stable solution that some would label “the fast lane to the internet”. The billing is much different and typically broken into a loop, or last mile, and a port, the actual access. For more info on telecom billing click here for our latest blog post on telecom billing.

 

With shared access, you not only need to worry about your carrier’s peering arrangements, you also need to consider how many others are on and are expected to be on your network. Gigabit Fiber, Google Fiber, Fiber to the Home, AT&T Business Fiber all use a technology called GPON or Passive Optical Network. Metroethernet is active, not passive, allowing for fully duplexed package transmissions.

 

GPON, like cable and all shared architectures, has a capacity shared by the whole neighborhood. Active Ethernet can go up to 100Gbps whereas a GPON routers can only handle 2.5Gbps maximum download and is split between at least 64 circuits. The upload speeds are not as high. Furthermore, point to point WANs are not capable via GPON routers. For more information on the differences between shared and dedicated internet access, contact us here