Here is the image you are seeing:

You have a small business … with less than 10 employees … who are connected to a router connected to a DSL modem.

Everyone must be connected to an online database via the Internet all day. You and your staff access the database to enter a lot of data and upload files. When everyone is logged in, the upload / download speed is often incredibly slow.

When you run DSL speed tests on any of the machines in your office, it shows around 1.1 Mbps in the morning. By midafternoon, speeds were reduced to 600 kbps on most machines. You’ve even seen them as low as 350 kbps.

Would a fractional T1 solve this problem? Fractional T1s in your area cost about $ 290 / month. You don’t think a standard 1.5Mbps internet T1 line is really affordable for you at $ 399 / month. (The dollar figures are just an example for the purposes of this article.)

Well … here is your answer:

Reliability, trustworthiness, and suitability for a particular purpose have more to do with the shared nature of the services you are using than with “speed.” DSL is a shared resource service. Shared means that many clients share an underlying Internet backbone connection … that’s why their speeds drop during the day … more users watch music videos from home in the afternoon than in the morning, absorbing the full width of vendor band. If the “fractional T1” provider will also share its Internet backbone connection with many of its customers, it is likely that you will find the same at the new carrier, although peak times would be different.

The provider that offers you a “T1” for $ 399 / mo is likely to share your trunk as well.

Remember that a shared service provider will measure the speed from your office to your office and will not guarantee performance to the Internet backbone. If the shared provider has a 45M connection and sells a 1.5M connection to 30 customers, what happens to customer number 31? A shared provider will put you on the same connection. The same goes for client 32 and client 33, and that’s where speed issues arise.

What you need is a dedicated connection to the Internet backbone, where you have your own chunk of bandwidth that is not shared with other users. He says he can’t afford $ 399. That’s $ 20 a day. That’s one hour of a decent employee. What you cannot afford are problems with your internet circuit and shared connections are causing you problems.

However … before you change your network setup and rush to get more bandwidth, first give the current carrier a chance to fix what might be broken.