Fiber optic Internet is an Internet service that is delivered over an optical cable using light to deliver services. One of the biggest benefits to fiber is its ability to easily scale to nearly any speed a carrier is capable of delivering without additional equipment.

Business grade fiber services almost always come with a service level agreement or SLA. An SLA is a guarantee to meet certain targets such as uptime, packet delivery, latency, and repair time. For businesses that depend on Internet services and cannot afford downtime or bandwidth quality issues, these are important to have.

Fiber tends to be one of the more expensive business Internet services due in part to construction costs, the service quality and uptime commitments, and the dedicated nature of the bandwidth. In many cases, construction costs can be absorbed with a term commitment.

Fiber is an excellent choice for rapidly growing businesses, those that have a large amount of real-time traffic such as VoIP or video conferencing, or businesses with symmetrical (same upload and download speed) bandwidth needs and makes the most sense for speeds from 50Mbps to 10Gbps.

Cable Internet is provided over coaxial cable, the same cable that is used by television providers. It provides good scalability in most areas, and generally has low monthly and upfront costs.

Cable Internet bandwidth is shared at your neighborhood or area node with others in your area. While this generally does not pose an issue, at times of high congestion, you may see your peak speeds degraded some. More recently, cable Internet providers are over provisioning the speeds to your modem by 10-20%. This helps to ensure that you achieve your advertised speeds.

While coaxial cable is capable of achieving speeds of 1Gbps, most areas have not deployed these technologies as of yet. Typical speeds range from 10Mbps to 300Mbps. Upload and download speeds are usually asymmetrical where the upload speeds are a fraction of the download speeds (usually 1/10th to 1/3rd.)

For many small to medium businesses, cable is the go to service because of its value, quick installation times, and service availability versus DSL and fiber. It is also used as a backup for many businesses with larger primary connections.

A Digital Subscriber Line or DSL is an Internet service delivered over twisted copper pair telephone lines, and is generally offered by local telephone companies or competitive local exchanage carriers (CLEC’s.)

DSL is not shared like cable Internet until it reaches the telephone company central office. This can help with eliminating service and latency variances during high bandwidth demand times, but does not eliminate them. DSL is very distance dependent, and available speeds vary based on how far you are from the central office. The further away you are, the lower the available speed offerings will be.

DSL has very low startup costs and low monthly costs. Available speeds vary from 1Mbps to about 40Mbps, although higher speeds are available in some areas using VDSL technology.

DSL is very popular as a basic Internet service and as a backup Internet connection. In most cases the bandwidth is asymmetrical where the upload speeds are a fraction of the download speeds (1/10th to 1/2.)