Almost every quote you receive will be one of three things, and the price gaps between them are large enough that picking wrong costs real money in either direction — overpaying for a circuit you do not need, or under-buying and discovering it during your busiest week.
Dedicated Internet Access
DIA is a fiber connection reserved for your business alone. Symmetrical speeds from 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps, and — the part that actually matters — a written SLA covering uptime, latency, packet delivery and repair time. Your speed never depends on what the neighbours are doing, because there are no neighbours on it.
It is the right answer when downtime costs you money by the hour: anything hosting its own services, running VoIP at scale, moving large files on deadline, or operating under a compliance regime that expects a documented connection.
Shared fiber
Shared fiber delivers fiber-grade speed over infrastructure shared with other subscribers, at broadband-style pricing. Support is best-effort and there is no meaningful SLA. For a growing team that wants fast internet without an enterprise budget, it is frequently the correct commercial decision — and there is no shame in it.
The honest caveat: "up to" speeds are contended. At 4pm on a Tuesday in a busy building, you get what is left.
Coax
Coax is the budget option, and it earns its place in two situations. The first is a very small office where the alternative is paying enterprise rates for capacity nobody uses. The second is more interesting: coax makes an excellent backup circuit under a fiber primary, because it typically enters the building on a physically different path. Diversity of path matters more than raw speed when your primary is cut.
The decision, in one question
Ask what one hour of no internet costs your business. If the answer is "not much, we would go get coffee," shared fiber or coax is probably right. If the answer makes you wince, you want DIA with an SLA — and quite possibly a diverse backup underneath it.
The most expensive mistake is not buying the wrong tier. It is buying the right tier from the only carrier you thought to ask.
What we would tell you
We quote all three, and we will say plainly when the cheaper one is correct for your situation. A business that starts on shared fiber and upgrades to DIA in two years is a good outcome. A business sold a 10 Gbps circuit it will never fill is not.
