Business broadband is cheap and usually good enough — until it isn't. Dedicated internet costs more and is almost always worth it for the workloads that keep a firm running. The right answer for most firms, quietly, is both — deployed intentionally rather than by accident.
The SLA is the product
Dedicated internet is priced against a real guarantee: uptime, latency, packet loss, mean time to repair. Broadband is priced against 'best effort.' For revenue-generating work — court appearances, cloud practice systems, real-time client meetings — the SLA is the entire point, and it is worth the delta.
Symmetric matters more than headline speed
Uploads move meaningfully more traffic than they used to — client portals, cloud practice systems, video, backup, discovery productions. Symmetric bandwidth is now more important than a big download number, and firms buying on advertised download speed are consistently under-provisioning their upload path.
Diversity is the real resilience
Two circuits from the same carrier on the same fiber path is one outage waiting to happen. Different carriers, different physical entries, different transports — that is real diversity. Firms that pay for redundancy without diversity discover the gap on the day they can least afford to.
Design for the worst normal day
Bandwidth should be sized for the peak of a busy trial week with everyone in the office on a video hearing, not for the average Tuesday. Firms that size to the average discover their design was inadequate exactly when they need it most.
5G is a real complement now
Modern 5G failover is fast enough to keep an entire office productive during a fiber outage, at a cost that makes the math almost automatic. Adding it to a dedicated-plus-broadband design produces genuine three-way resilience for a modest premium.
The billing story
Consolidating connectivity billing under a single managed provider often produces savings that offset a meaningful share of the dedicated-circuit premium. Firms with fifteen separate carrier invoices are usually paying more than they realize simply in administrative overhead.
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Sarah Lin
Legal Tech Editor
