Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) gives healthcare organizations a private, SLA-backed circuit with guaranteed symmetrical bandwidth — the connectivity standard for EHR access, telehealth, imaging transfers, and VoIP that patient care depends on. We compare DIA availability, SLAs, and pricing across 200+ carriers for your facilities, free.
When scheduling, EHR access, e-prescribing, telehealth visits, and nurse-call systems all ride the internet connection, "usually fast" isn't good enough. DIA is a circuit reserved solely for your facility: bandwidth never dips because a neighboring business is busy, uploads run as fast as downloads (critical for imaging and telehealth), and the carrier signs a service-level agreement with financial teeth.
Shared cable broadband still has a role — as an inexpensive backup path or for administrative sites — but patient-facing operations run on DIA at most hospitals and multi-provider clinics.
Uptime: 99.99% or better for hospital circuits (about 4 minutes of allowable downtime a month). Mean time to repair: 4 hours or less, with escalation contacts in writing. Latency and jitter guarantees: needed for telehealth video and VoIP quality. Credits: automatic, not claim-only. We read the SLA fine print across carriers so you can compare commitments, not just prices.
Small clinic (1–5 providers): 100–300 Mbps symmetrical DIA. Imaging-heavy or multi-provider practice: 500 Mbps – 1 Gbps. Community hospital: 1–2 Gbps with a diverse backup circuit. Regional health system campus: multi-gig DIA, often from two carriers on separate physical paths. Telehealth adds roughly 5 Mbps per concurrent video visit; PACS/imaging transfers are the usual driver of upload requirements.
A single circuit — however good its SLA — is still a single point of failure. Most healthcare designs pair primary DIA with a secondary connection from a different carrier and entry path (often fixed wireless for true physical diversity), with SD-WAN handling automatic failover so staff never notice a cutover. We design and price the whole package, not just the primary circuit.
It genuinely depends on the building: the "best" provider is the one with fiber already at your address, the right SLA, and competitive pricing — commonly AT&T, Lumen, Comcast Business, Spectrum Enterprise, Verizon, or Zayo, but the answer changes by street. As an independent broker we check availability and pricing across 200+ carriers for every facility on your list and present the real options side by side. Carriers pay us, so the comparison is free to you.
Hospitals typically require 99.99% uptime or better on primary circuits - roughly four minutes of allowable downtime per month - plus a mean-time-to-repair commitment of four hours or less and automatic service credits.
It can work at small scale, but shared circuits have variable upload speeds and no latency guarantees, so video quality degrades unpredictably. DIA provides the symmetrical bandwidth and latency commitments telehealth programs need at volume.
If fiber already reaches the building, 30-60 days is typical. New fiber construction can take 90-120+ days, which is why we start availability checks early and can arrange fixed wireless as an interim connection.