It is in almost every office brochure: "fibre available". That sounds good. But it actually says very little. Fibre to the meter cupboard is something quite different from a fast, stable connection at your desk on the fourth floor.
These are the questions you should ask.
How far does the fibre go?
Fibre enters the building at one point: the connection point, often in the basement or meter cupboard. From there the signal continues over the internal cabling. If that is old copper cable, you will never get the speed of the fibre.
So do not just ask whether there is fibre, but also how the signal travels through the building after that.
Is the connection shared or dedicated?
There are roughly two types of business fibre:
- Shared: you share capacity with other users. Often cheaper, but at busy times the speed can drop.
- Dedicated: the capacity is yours alone. You get what is in the contract, even when your neighbours are using a lot of bandwidth.
For a small office, shared can be perfectly fine. For an organisation that works entirely in the cloud, dedicated is often the wiser choice.
Is the connection symmetrical?
With a symmetrical connection, the upload speed is as high as the download speed. That matters for video calls, cloud backups and sending large files. Many consumer connections are asymmetrical. For businesses, symmetrical is usually the better choice.
What happens if the connection fails?
A digger in the street can hit a fibre cable. If that happens, your business is offline, unless there is a backup. There are two levels:
- A 4G or 5G backup. A device automatically switches over to the mobile network. Better than nothing, but with limited capacity.
- A second fixed connection. Preferably entering the building via a different route, and possibly from a different provider. This is called redundancy. With dual entry, a damaged cable in the street only affects one of the two connections.
For the highest IT-Label, IT1+, redundant fibre is part of the description.
What is in the contract?
Look at the SLA: the agreements with the provider on availability and repair time. How quickly is a fault fixed? At night and at weekends too? A connection without a clear SLA is a risk.
Also check who holds the contract: the owner or the tenant. And what happens when the tenant leaves. Agreements like these belong in the IT Demarcation List.
How do you know for sure?
By measuring it. A brochure may say "1 Gbit/s", but what you get in practice depends on the whole chain: from the connection through the cabling and network equipment to the desk. During a pre-inspection or audit we measure exactly that.
Want a quick indication first? Take the self-scan.