Dedicated Fiber vs Business Cable
The choice isn't fiber-vs-cable — it's 'do you need an SLA?' Dedicated fiber gives you symmetrical speeds with a contractual uptime guarantee. Cable gives you fast download speeds with no guarantee, often at a fraction of the price. Match the tool to the job.
Side by side
| Feature | Dedicated Fiber | Business Cable |
|---|---|---|
| Service tier | DIA (Dedicated Internet Access) | Business cable (shared) |
| Typical 500 Mbps MRC | $449-549/mo | ✓$169-199/mo |
| Symmetrical speeds | ✓Yes (500/500, 1G/1G) | No (1G down, 35 Mbps up) |
| SLA uptime guarantee | ✓99.9% to 100% | Best-effort (no guarantee) |
| SLA repair time | ✓4-8 hours typical | Next business day, no guarantee |
| Static IPs | ✓Multiple included | Optional add-on |
| Install timeline | 30-90 days (sometimes longer if construction) | ✓1-2 weeks typical |
| Best for | Mission-critical apps, VPN, voice, cloud-heavy ops | Backup circuit, casual office use, cost-sensitive |
| Voice quality (VoIP) | ✓Excellent (low latency, jitter) | Variable, especially under load |
| Performance during peak | ✓Consistent (dedicated bandwidth) | Can degrade during peak hours |
When to choose Dedicated Fiber
Your business depends on internet. Outages cost real money. You run VoIP, host cloud-based critical apps, do video conferencing daily, or need consistent performance. Healthcare, finance, legal, and any e-commerce should default to fiber.
When to choose Business Cable
You're cost-sensitive, your operations can tolerate occasional outages, and you mostly need download speed for browsing/email/light cloud apps. Or you're using cable as a backup circuit behind your primary fiber.
The honest bottom line
Fiber is the right answer for most businesses with 10+ employees, especially if you have voice or cloud workloads. Cable is fine for very small offices or as a redundant backup. Many of our customers run both — fiber primary, cable failover — for the best resilience-to-cost ratio.
Get the right one for your address
Pricing depends on your specific building. Tell Byte where you are and we'll pull live channel rates for both carriers (and any other competitors at your address).
Common questions about this comparison
How do I know which one serves my building?
Both maintain different fiber footprints. The fastest way to check is type your address into Byte above — we run a real serviceability check across all carriers and tell you who actually serves you, not just who claims coverage on their map.
Are these prices accurate for my city?
The numbers in the table are typical channel rates from current rate cards, but actual pricing varies by market. We always pull a live quote for your specific address and verify with the carrier before you sign anything.
What about other carriers like Spectrum, Frontier, Cogent?
We work with 200+ carriers. This page just zeroes in on these two. When you start a quote with Byte, we show you everything available at your address — not just the carriers in this comparison.