The 3pm slowdown
Everyone on the floor knows the feeling. The morning is fine, and then around three in the afternoon the line sags: calls stutter, uploads crawl, the cloud app spins. Nothing has broken. This is simply what a shared connection does when the whole neighbourhood is using it at once. The lobby is Grade A. The question is whether the line is. Understanding why the slowdown happens makes the choice between shared and dedicated straightforward.
What “shared” fibre actually is
A shared, or contended, connection is sold to many customers against the same underlying capacity, on the assumption that not everyone uses it at once. The ratio of subscribers to capacity is the contention ratio, and it is why the advertised speed is an “up to” figure rather than a promise. At quiet hours you may see close to it; at peak, when it matters most, you share with everyone else and the real speed falls.
Two other things come with shared service. The speed is “best-effort”, so there is no commitment to what you will actually get, and no real accountability when it drops. And you usually sit behind shared, changing public IP addresses, which rules out hosting a service, running a clean VPN, or reliable remote access. For a home or a very small office, none of this matters much. For a floor of people who depend on the line to work, the peak is exactly the wrong time to be sharing.
What “dedicated” means
A dedicated line is reserved for you. The technical term is CIR — committed information rate — bandwidth that is dedicated and uncontended, sized to your office or building. Because it is committed, the speed is consistent and symmetric: the figure you are sized for is the figure you get, upload as well as download, at three in the afternoon as much as at nine in the morning, at any tier you choose.
With it come static IPs, which give you fixed, reachable addresses for servers, VPN and remote access, and a single partner who is accountable for the connection. We supply CIR links from all the major networks, with the option of a second carrier for redundancy as a design choice, so the supply is chosen for your building rather than sold off a shelf. We keep this explainer vendor-neutral: we do not quote uptime percentages or name carriers.
It is also worth naming the symmetry difference plainly. Most shared connections are far faster to download than to upload, which suits browsing and streaming but not a business. The moment your office sends data out — backing up to the cloud, hosting a video call where your camera matters as much as theirs, moving large files to clients, or letting staff reach a server on the floor — the upload path is what you lean on, and on a shared line it is the first thing to choke. A dedicated line is symmetric by design: the speed out matches the speed in, which is usually the half of the connection a shared product quietly skimps on.
When shared is fine, and when it isn’t
There is no need to over-buy. Shared fibre is perfectly sensible for a small office doing email, browsing and the occasional call. The upgrade earns its cost when the shape of your work changes: when you run your own servers, depend on a VPN or on cloud applications, carry voice over the line, support staff working remotely, or simply cannot afford the floor to go slow at the wrong moment. The honest test is not the headline speed but how much a bad afternoon costs you.
Static IPs and why they matter
A static IP is an address that does not change. That sounds small, but a great deal depends on it. Hosting a service that others reach, running a VPN so staff connect securely from outside, allowing reliable remote access to a machine on the floor, and running your own mail all work far better — or only work — with a fixed address. On a shared connection with changing IPs, these are fragile or impossible. On a dedicated line, they are routine.
It’s not just the line
A fast line is only as good as the network and firewall behind it. A dedicated connection feeding a flat, unsegmented office network with consumer Wi-Fi and no firewall policy still disappoints. The line, the network, the segmentation, the security and the cameras are one system, best designed and owned together by a single accountable partner. See enterprise networking.
How to decide
Start from the work, not the brochure. If a slow afternoon costs you little, shared fibre is fine. If your business runs on the connection, a dedicated CIR line sized at a survey is the upgrade that pays for itself. See dedicated internet lines and the rest of our commercial and high-rise work, including our Gulberg business district coverage, then book your Signal Survey.