Most business internet is sold on one number: download speed. It is close to the least useful figure on the quote. What determines whether your card terminals clear, your calls hold and your staff can work is a set of things that rarely appear in the advertising at all.
What business internet actually buys you
A business connection and a residential one can arrive on the same street over the same technology, and still be different products. What you're paying the premium for is usually four things: a service level agreement with a defined response time, business-hours-or-better support with an escalation path, symmetrical or near-symmetrical upload, and the option of a static IP.
If a quote doesn't specify those, you may be looking at a residential product with a business label. That's not always wrong — a single-location shop with a card terminal and a laptop may be perfectly served by it — but you should know which one you're buying.
Fibre, cable and 5G
These aren't ranked. A cable connection with a 5G failover often beats a lone fibre line for real-world uptime, because the failure modes are independent. What matters is matching the technology to what the site actually does.
Why upload speed decides more than download
Almost everything a business does that feels "slow" is upload-bound. Card authorisations, cloud POS syncing, voice calls, video meetings, backups, sending large files, security cameras streaming offsite — all of it pushes data out.
A 1,000 Mbps download with 30 Mbps upload will feel worse in a busy shop than a 300/300 connection. If you compare one number between quotes, compare upload.
Contention, and the number nobody quotes
Shared-medium connections divide capacity among everyone on the segment. That's why a cable line can test beautifully at 7am and struggle at 6pm. The ratio is rarely published, which is precisely why it's worth asking about — and why a business-grade product with a defined commitment behaves differently from a consumer one at peak.
SLAs and what "99.9%" means
Uptime percentages sound reassuring and are easy to misread. Translate them into time before you compare:
The more useful clause is usually not the percentage but the response and restoration commitment: how fast someone is dispatched, and what you're credited if they aren't. An SLA without a remedy is a statement of intent.
Static IPs — and when you need one
Most businesses don't need one. You do if you're hosting something reachable from outside, running a VPN endpoint, using remote access to on-site systems, running IP-restricted services, or operating security cameras or door systems you reach remotely. If none of that applies, a dynamic address is fine and cheaper.
What an outage really costs
Redundancy gets declined because it's a visible monthly line item and the risk is invisible — until it isn't. The honest way to decide is to price the downside once: your revenue per open hour, multiplied by the hours you'd realistically be down, multiplied by how often that happens. Our cost-of-downtime calculator does that arithmetic with your own figures.
For many retail and hospitality businesses the answer lands somewhere that makes a backup connection look inexpensive. For a quiet office, it often doesn't. Both are fine answers — the point is to have run the numbers rather than guessed.
Multiple sites
Once you're past two or three locations, the question stops being "what internet does this site get" and becomes "how do these sites behave as one network". That's where SD-WAN earns its keep: consistent policy, central visibility, and the ability to fail a site over without anyone driving there.
FAQ
It depends entirely on what stops if it fails. If you take card payments, run cloud software or answer calls over it, the SLA and support path are what you're buying, and they usually justify the difference. If it's a back-office connection for email, often not.
Fewer businesses are download-constrained than assume they are. Count concurrent users and what they do — voice calls, cloud POS, video, cameras and backups all consume upload. Sizing upload correctly matters more than buying a bigger download tier.
Often yes, and it can be a sensible arrangement — provided the two connections don't share the same physical path or the same failure point. A wireline primary with a wireless backup gives you genuine independence.
It varies by address and technology. Where the infrastructure is already at the building it can be quick; where a build is required it takes longer. Ask for the estimate in writing before you give notice on an existing service.
Tell us your address, what runs on the connection, and how much an hour offline costs you. We'll tell you what's actually available there and what we'd recommend — including when the cheaper option is the right one.
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