Water, electricity … internet? Why your connectivity isn’t a commodity

At home or at work, internet access today feels as basic as home heating, running water, or light at the flick of a switch: always-there, always-on, ready for us to use without effort. But is internet connectivity really the commodity it seems to be?

Water may come from different sources, but it’s always the same H2O from your tap. Electricity may be generated from oil, solar, or nuclear, but at the socket, it’s always the same flow of sparks. It doesn’t matter who you buy these things from because, aside from price, they’re the same from every vendor: all are, by definition, commodities.

Here’s the kicker: enterprise-capable internet isn’t like that. However commoditized it feels on the surface.

Because what lies beneath–the underlay–matters: how the supporting elements (physical hardware, technology choices) perform across various metrics (speed, latency, how contended its capacity, and how diversity is achieved).

And without it, your overlay – like your VPN, SD-WAN, SaaS applications, and the cloud your people use every day –, alone, won’t get the job done.

Need some proof? Let’s explore what you need to know to design that ideal solution, from the ground up.

First things first: your use case

The first step is to look at what you’re connecting (yes, it’s that basic).

Are you linking two downtown offices, or two high-capacity data centers? What’s on the wire: mission-critical IoT data – maybe small in volume, but time-dependent – or 24/7 streaming video in endless gushing gigabytes? Is it upstream-dependent or downstream-heavy? And what does the map look like: a few buildings on an SD-WAN, or hundreds of branch offices scattered across continents?

There’s a right choice for every situation (and you can always mix and match) – whether your locations are deep in the rainforest or at the heart of a financial center. Let’s list them.

Shared broadband: contended but straightforward

The most basic is a shared connection, a.k.a. business broadband, used by millions (even billions) of people and organizations. Thanks to proven technology and agreed standards, it works well in many use cases – with excellent coverage in most population centers – and can be extremely cost-effective.

But there’s one thing to remember: broadband is usually delivered to you on a shared “pipe”, whether that’s a physical cable, cellular network, or satellite constellation. You’re one of a group using the same capacity – perhaps in your building, your office campus, or a whole neighborhood. And depending on usage patterns, that ultrafast 1Gb/s connection might fall to a tenth (or less) of that in busy times.

This means a shared connection makes sense if your applications are tolerant of time and capacity. Like e-mail or desktop productivity suites like Office365. But for anything real-time, like mass video conferencing or streaming media, you’ll want to look elsewhere.

DIA: availability across every site, every service

One “elsewhere” is Dedicated Internet Access (DIA). It may come to you on the same physical infrastructure – like an optical fiber – but with a twist: a portion of that capacity is reserved for your use only. Often accompanied by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to guarantee bandwidth (both for uploads and downloads), uptime, and performance metrics (those which we’ll talk about below).

This is the difference between shared and DIA: the former is best-effort, the latter guaranteed service. Making it ideal for high-volume apps you rent in the cloud.

Note, though, DIA is still a connection to the internet itself, not specifically to your locations around the world – and that’s where a third option comes in.

Private connectivity: gold standard service, at a price point to match

Private services are the height of connectivity: a circuit available to you alone. If DIA is like having your own lane on the freeway, a private connection gives you your own actual road. Again, the underlay has a choice of hardware: a contract using telco infrastructure, a cable laid for your own use, a Point-to-Point solution using microwave wireless. This doesn’t mean, however, that they’re right for every business.

First, private links can cost more. (Sometimes a lot more.) And they’re not “internet connections”, but connect resources specific to your business: your datacenter, a campus, a cloud region, a remote jungle site upriver.

So private connections are very specific to use cases, often at enterprise scale, where reliability, capacity, and security must be beyond question – financial services, energy exploration, mission-critical applications.

If that’s you, private links should definitely be on your consideration list.

Connectivity by the numbers: differences across regions

But technologies are only one aspect. If you needed further proof that business connectivity isn’t a commodity, these are it: bandwidth, contention, and latency. Time to look at these and a few others in detail:

Bandwidth: how the headline figure varies

First, remember bandwidth isn’t an absolute, but a balance. Urban parts of North America, Asia, and Europe enjoy 1Gb/s+ speeds to both homes and businesses; advanced cities like Singapore can offer many times that figure. But rural areas may struggle to hit 100Mb/s, while in places like the Middle East, high bandwidth carries a startlingly high cost. So, a sound business case means matching your bandwidth to your needs.

An agribusiness covering hundreds of hectares may contain thousands of IoT sensors, but the actual data throughput needed is just a few kilobits per greenhouse. So when designing your solution, don’t overpay for bandwidth you don’t need.

Contention: how crowded is your pipe?

A contended pipe may sound undesirable, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. So, for your everyday business requirements, “normal” broadband may be all you need 95% of the time.

An office-based business for whom internet connectivity means messaging and cloud productivity apps may not need a high-end SLA. Businesses managing lots of data or large files, like a graphic design firm or a distribution center, will.

So explore whether cost-effective broadband, with a sensible backup option for downtime, answers your needs.

Latency: no time to wait around

Ping, ping, ping: it’s not audible to humans, but the time it takes for a chunk of data to travel between local and remote servers – its “ping time” – makes a huge difference to the internet experience. Under 50 milliseconds works just fine for most businesses, and sub-20ms offers silky-smooth service even for video streaming and online gaming providers. But a ping of just 100ms starts to look shaky … and 200ms will ruin your team’s whole day.

So don’t look just at bandwidth alone; challenge ISPs on their latency. The distance your data travels is key when choosing the underlay. It may only be milliseconds, but it applies to every packet of data sent and received.

Diversity, and its hidden risks

How do you cope when things go wrong? That’s the goal of diversity: a second connection for backup, failover, or simply extra capacity, ideally a separate stretch of infrastructure from a different provider.

The issue: in many smaller towns and rural areas, different ISPs will use the same backbone (like a single shared fiber) owned by a national telco. It looks like you’ve got backup … but you haven’t. As you’ll find out when that single fiber suffers a cable cut.

There’re many ways of achieving diversity. For example, using different technologies. Would you like a main connection via owned fiber, additional capacity via VDSL telephony, or LEO satellites, backed up again by a boosted mobile antenna linking your site to cellular networks? It’s all possible. But the best combination may not be obvious.

Lead time: the run-up to rolling out

When picking and choosing between services, don’t forget to look at how long it’ll take your partner to make the service available.

The more complicated your situation, the longer this tends to be. A new lease on an existing building in town … probably just days before you’re enjoying solid connectivity. But a new site in the outskirts of the city? Or are you looking to build a new entry for your diversity requirements? It all takes time.

Long lead times can play havoc with your business plan. So look at lead times the same way you’d look at physical construction work: dates, deadlines, penalties for non-delivery.

Ongoing service and support: tearing up the red tape

Lastly, the paperwork. The more complex your connectivity, the more ISPs you’ll need to research, the more contracts you’ll have to manage, and the more gaps and mismatches might lie hidden beneath the surface. And there’s a reason we left this until last: it’s why GNX customers find our connectivity platform – called GNX+ ­– most valuable.

What if you could explore, plan, design, and test different combinations of network assets to discover the best possible business case across your organization … in a simple way?

• One place to source all your global connectivity from
• One party to contract with
• One platform to monitor your network
• One point of contact if you seek support

That’s why GNX exists. Not just an internet aggregator – but a true partner, bringing together thousands of ISPs, MSPs, and carriers in over 190 countries under a single contract, contact, SLAs, and one single platform.

Straightforward connectivity.