Stop Buying Gig Fiber Like It's Whole Life Insurance
If you're shopping business internet in Greenville, the carrier rep's quote probably looks familiar: symmetric fiber, a Meraki firewall, phones through their RingCentral bundle, and a three-year term. They'll lean on downtime until you feel behind.
We've been placing and supporting business circuits in the Upstate since 2006. That's the carrier's default bundle — not ours. We see it on proposals clients ask us to review before they sign. Same pitch every time: scare you on uptime, sell the expensive circuit, attach firewall and phones, lock the term.
Dave Ramsey tells people to buy term life and invest the difference instead of whole life. Carrier internet quotes work the same way. Buy the circuit that fits the work. Spend what you save on backup, security, and phones — not on bandwidth and contract length you'll never use.
For most fifteen-person offices we work with — professional services, medical, agencies, light manufacturing — that bundle is more pipe and lock-in than daily work requires. The services aren't fake. Outlook, Teams, VoIP, and a cloud app don't need a six-hundred-dollar symmetric circuit. What they do need is a second path when the first line dies, a firewall someone actually manages, and a phone vendor who picks up when audio drops.
What the numbers look like here
These are ranges from quotes we run every week. Your address and promo timing will move them.
Gig business coax with a static IP — what most of our clients run on — is usually $200 a month or less. Gig down, upload in the 35–50 meg range, static for VPN or edge gear. Typically month-to-month.
Dedicated symmetric fiber at 100×100 is closer to $600 a month here, often on a three-year contract.
That four-hundred-dollar gap every month adds up. On coax it's usually month-to-month. On DIA it's often locked for three years.
"Dedicated" doesn't mean one thing
Gig coax with a static handles daily work fine for most offices we install. We're not arguing coax because fiber is evil — we're arguing the upsell.
On the phone, dedicated gets used two ways. Sometimes it means true Dedicated Internet Access: symmetric speeds, guaranteed bandwidth, financial SLA with credits. That's the ~$600/month product with the multi-year term. Real thing. Some offices need it.
Sometimes it means business-grade fiber that's dedicated to your building and then rides shared carrier infrastructure upstream. Same word, different product, very different price.
AT&T publishes the split on their own site. Business Fiber lists from about $60 to $285 a month — symmetrical, often month-to-month. Dedicated Internet is the separate SKU: private, unshared, SLA-backed, quote-only, several times the cost at the same speed. Spectrum climbs the same way from business coax into Enterprise DIA.
Before you sign, ask what's on the contract: Business Fiber, DIA, or something in between. If you don't need true DIA, the monthly spread between that quote and gig coax is money for backup and a perimeter someone watches.
What actually stops work
It's usually not upload speed.
It's one circuit and no failover. A Meraki that was sold on the quote and never managed again. Phones in a carrier bundle where the ISP blames RingCentral and RingCentral blames the ISP and you're in the middle.
After Hurricane Helene in late 2024, thousands of Spectrum customers in Greenville and Spartanburg counties were still offline weeks later — local reporting had restoration timelines sliding for thousands per county. That wasn't a normal Tuesday. When the plant takes damage, one line with no backup stops the whole office — coax or fiber, any speed tier.
Fixing that is rarely "buy symmetric fiber for three years." It's primary internet that carries the day, a second path when the first fails, and one team that configured both.
What we deploy for a typical fifteen-person office
Primary: gig coax with a static, the ~$200-or-less circuit above.
Backup: Spectrum's wireless LTE add-on (~$20/month) for email and a card reader during an outage, or Starlink/cellular on the Meraki when the whole site needs to stay up. Depends on the building.
Firewall: our RaaS stack — Meraki hardware, Advanced Security license, next-business-day warranty, config and support, Tenable external scans on the perimeter. Rates are on our pricing page under managed firewall.
Meraki on a carrier quote is usually hardware plus license, often more than our full RaaS, without support or monthly third-party scans. A box on paper isn't a perimeter someone monitors.
Phones: GoTo Connect, month-to-month, on the network we built. Spectrum's RingCentral bundles often cost more per seat and push annual terms for the best rate. Our clients care about price, contract length, and who answers when a call sounds wrong.
We sell and provision the circuits too — Spectrum, AT&T, whatever's on-net at your address. Quote, order, failover on our gear, phone answered at four on a Friday. Circuit, firewall, phones — us.
Rough math at fifteen users: coax, backup, managed firewall, GoTo — often hundreds less per month than symmetric fiber, standalone Meraki, RingCentral, and no backup. Your headcount and address change the total; on fiber the gap often repeats for three years.
When we'd quote fiber anyway
Self-hosted servers that need guaranteed bandwidth. Heavy upstream file workflows. Hard SLAs in a contract or compliance framework. Multi-site WAN that needs engineering.
If that's you, we'll build for it.
If the stack is email, VoIP, and Microsoft 365, six hundred a month in symmetric dedicated bandwidth is usually more than the office uses. Two hundred in coax carries the load, with budget left for the backup line that limits downtime.
Our ProSupport is month-to-month. GoTo is month-to-month. Coax usually is. AT&T Business Fiber often is. A three-year fiber contract assumes your office in 2029 looks like today — same headcount, same vendors, same price after promos end. We'd rather earn the work every month.
Before you sign
If the fiber bundle total feels heavy, call before you commit. We'll walk through what you actually run and what we'd put in — coax or fiber, backup, RaaS, phones — for your address.
Sometimes symmetric dedicated fiber is the answer. More often it's gig coax, backup, managed Meraki with vulnerability scans, and hosted phones that cost less — with money still on the table.