Shared fiber
Bandwidth is split between several customers at a contention ratio. At 3 p.m. it can be perfect and at 8 p.m. it is not. It is cheaper and usually enough for a small office doing email and browsing.
Business fiber: the difference is in what nobody advertises.
Service overview
Two fiber links with the same advertised speed can behave completely differently. What decides whether your operation works is not the megabits, but whether the link is dedicated, whether it is symmetric, and what happens when it fails.
Dedicated or shared: the question that changes both price and outcome.
It is the first distinction, and it almost never appears in the advertising.
Dedicated fiber
The capacity you contract is yours at all times, with no contention. It costs more, but it is the only thing that sustains an operation that depends on the link: telephony, on-premise servers, video calls or sites joined by VPN.
The concrete question
Ask for the contention ratio. If the answer is 1:1, it is dedicated. If it is 1:8 or 1:20, you are sharing with 8 or 20 customers. If nobody can give you the number, you already know which it is.
Why symmetry matters more than it seems.
A link with 200 Mbps down and 20 up is advertised as "200 megas". For browsing that is fine. For operating, it is not.
Almost everything a business does uploads data rather than downloading it: the voice of every call, your image on a video call, the nightly backup, the files you share, whatever an on-premise server serves, and all the VPN traffic to another site.
With 20 Mbps of upload, twenty simultaneous calls and a backup running at the same time already compete with each other. The classic symptom: "the internet is fine but calls keep breaking up". It is not the telephony, it is a saturated uplink.
Voice over IP
Video calls
Backups
Site-to-site VPN
On-premise servers
Remote desktops
Cameras
Cloud
What to ask before you sign.
Six questions that separate a business link from a residential one with a company invoice.
Is it dedicated?
Contention ratio stated in the contract, not verbally.
Is it symmetric?
Upload speed equal to download, or at least enough for how you actually operate.
Does it include a static public IP?
Required for VPN, servers, cameras and to publish any service of your own.
What does the SLA say?
Committed availability and, above all, time to restore: how long until you are back, not just how long you are down.
How is it supported?
Who you call at 9 p.m., and whether the incident is followed through or you just get a ticket number.
Is there redundancy?
If the link is critical, a second path with automatic failover stops being a luxury.
When to move to dedicated
- Your telephony lives on the link.
- You have sites joined by VPN.
- You run your own servers or cameras.
- The team is on video calls several hours a day.
- An hour without internet costs you measurable money.
Fiber with the operation watched.
An unmonitored link is discovered down when an unhappy customer calls. TelHarbor delivers fiber together with link supervision, alerts and incident follow-up, and integrates it with the rest of your operation: telephony, VPN, cloud and branches.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions about business fiber internet
What is the difference between dedicated and shared fiber?
With dedicated fiber the capacity you contract is yours at all times (1:1 ratio). With shared fiber it is split between several customers, so performance changes with the hour and with what others are doing. Always ask for the contention ratio in writing.
Why does symmetric fiber matter?
Because almost everything a business does uploads data: the voice of every call, video calls, backups, site-to-site VPN and on-premise servers. A link with lots of download and little upload saturates on the way up, and the typical symptom is calls breaking while "the internet is fine".
Do I need a static public IP?
If you are going to run a VPN, publish a server, connect cameras or register phone equipment against your PBX, yes. Without a static IP those configurations break every time the address changes.
What should I look for in the SLA?
More than the availability percentage, the committed time to restore: how long until service is back. A short, well-handled outage hurts less than a long one with a good annual percentage.
Is there fiber coverage at my location?
Availability depends on the exact address. TelHarbor checks coverage per site and, where fiber does not reach, proposes alternatives or a scheme with a backup link.