Two products sold under similar words to two completely different buyers. One question tells you which one you are — and the answer changes what you should be asking your provider.
Ask for “dedicated internet” in this market and you will be quoted at least three different things. Some of them are leased lines. Some are business broadband with a better SLA. One of them is IP transit, which is a wholesale product that most of the people asking do not want and would not know how to use.
The distinction is worth two minutes because it changes what you should be comparing on the quotes.
The Giveaway Question
Do you have your own AS number and your own IP addresses?
If yes, you want IP transit. You run a network, and what you are buying is for the rest of the internet to hear about it.
If no, you want dedicated internet access. You have equipment or offices that need to reach the internet reliably, and the addresses can come from us.
Almost everything else follows from that one answer.
What IP Transit Actually Is
IP transit is a BGP session. You announce your prefixes to us, we announce them onward to everyone we are connected to, and traffic for your addresses finds its way to you. You keep your own addressing, so you can change provider without renumbering a single machine — which is the entire reason organisations go to the trouble of getting their own allocation in the first place.
It is bought by hosting companies, ISPs, enterprises with their own allocation, and anyone running infrastructure in more than one place who wants the addressing to be theirs rather than borrowed.
What you are really buying is someone else’s routing table and the paths behind it. Two transit quotes at the same price can behave very differently depending on who the provider is connected to and where.
What Dedicated Internet Access Actually Is
DIA is a circuit with bandwidth that is yours. Not shared with the building, not contended with other customers at peak, not “up to”. If you buy 500 Mbps you get 500 Mbps at 9am on a Monday, and the SLA is written against that number.
That is the whole difference from business broadband, and it is why the price is different. Broadband is sold on the assumption that not everyone uses it at once. DIA is sold on the assumption that you might.
It is bought by offices that cannot afford a bad call, by equipment colocated in a facility, and by anyone whose “the internet is slow” problem turns out on inspection to be a contention problem.
Where the Confusion Comes From
The word dedicated does a lot of unearned work on quotes in this market. It can mean a dedicated circuit, a dedicated port on shared upstream capacity, or simply a product name. Ask which, in writing.
The three questions that separate the real thing from the marketing:
- Is the bandwidth committed or burstable? If burstable, what is the committed rate, and how is the rest billed — 95th percentile, or something else?
- What is the contention ratio? “None” is an answer. A refusal to answer is also an answer.
- Where does the circuit terminate, and what is between there and the internet? A dedicated circuit into a congested upstream is a dedicated path to a traffic jam.
What to Ask About Transit Specifically
If it is transit you want, the price per megabit is the least interesting number on the page. Ask instead:
- What are you connected to, and where? Paths matter more than headline capacity. A provider with good regional interconnection beats a bigger one with everything hauled somewhere else.
- Can I announce my own prefixes, and how quickly do changes take effect?
- Is IPv6 included or extra? It should be included.
- What happens during a DDoS? Null-routing your prefix is a legitimate answer, but you want to know it is the answer before it happens rather than during.
- Is there a second path? One session from one provider is a single point of failure whatever the SLA says.
The Case for Not Buying Either
If you have an office with twenty people, email, video calls and a few SaaS applications, a decent business broadband line from a local carrier is the right product and DIA is money you did not need to spend. The honest threshold is whether an hour of degraded connectivity costs you more than the difference in monthly price. For a lot of businesses it does not.
Equally, if you have no AS number and no plan to get one, transit is not a product you can use. Getting an allocation is a real process with real paperwork, and doing it purely to buy transit is backwards.
Why Where You Buy It Matters
We run our own network — AS200851 — rather than reselling someone else’s, which means the BGP session terminates with us and the person you reach about a routing problem can change the routing. Both products are available in Dubai DX1, Fujairah FJ1 and Vienna VIE2.
If your equipment is colocated with us, either product is a cross-connect rather than a circuit order, which takes days off the provisioning and a layer out of the fault domain. If you need a private path to a cloud provider rather than to the internet generally, that is a third thing again — cloud connect and peering.
Not sure which of the three you are? Tell us what you are trying to connect and we will tell you which one it is, including when the answer is none of them.
