Cloud ERP, MES, IoT telemetry, and remote diagnostics all ride your internet circuit — and a circuit outage can idle a production line at thousands of dollars per hour. DIA gives your plant guaranteed bandwidth with a contractual SLA. Typical 2026 pricing: $300–$700/month for 100 Mbps, $700–$2,000/month for 1 Gbps.
Shared cable or fiber broadband is fine for a front office; it is risky for a plant. Broadband is best-effort — speeds drop at peak times, upload is a fraction of download, and outage response has no teeth. When production systems moved to the cloud (ERP, MES, quality systems, WMS), the internet circuit became production infrastructure. DIA changes the terms: guaranteed symmetrical speed, 99.9%+ uptime SLA with credits, 4-hour repair targets, and proactive monitoring.
Rules of thumb we use with manufacturing clients: cloud ERP/MES sessions run about 1–2 Mbps per concurrent user; CAD/CAM file movement comes in large bursts — size for the burst, not the average; IoT and telemetry use little bandwidth but are latency- and jitter-sensitive; cloud-archived video security needs 2–4 Mbps per camera uplink; VoIP needs about 100 Kbps per call. A 150-person plant with cloud ERP and 30 cameras typically lands at 200–500 Mbps DIA — often paired with a separate broadband circuit for guest and non-production traffic.
For 24/7 operations the question is not whether the primary circuit is good — it is what happens when a backhoe finds it. Best practice is a diverse secondary: fixed wireless or a second wireline provider entering the building on a different path. SD-WAN makes failover automatic and lets both circuits carry traffic day-to-day. We design primary and backup as one procurement so the two never share a single point of failure.
Multi-plant manufacturers usually standardize: DIA at each production site, an SD-WAN overlay for site-to-site and cloud traffic, and centralized security. Buying each site's circuit separately from whoever serves that address is exactly the situation a broker helps with — we quote every carrier at every address in one pass and keep contract end-dates aligned so renewals do not sprawl.
Typical 2026 pricing: $300–$700/month for 100 Mbps, $500–$1,200/month for 500 Mbps, and $700–$2,000/month for 1 Gbps — driven mostly by building lit status and carrier competition at the address. Industrial parks are frequently served by fewer carriers than downtown cores, which makes competitive quoting matter more, not less. Construction charges for unlit buildings can often be negotiated to $0 with term. Check which carriers serve your plant's address — confirmed within 48 hours, free.
Most small-to-mid plants land between 200 Mbps and 1 Gbps dedicated. The drivers are cloud ERP/MES concurrency, camera uplinks, and file movement. We size from your actual systems rather than guessing — oversizing DIA is a common source of overspend.
If a connectivity outage stops production, scheduling, or shipping, yes. The SLA — guaranteed speeds, repair-time commitments, outage credits — is what you are buying. Many plants run DIA for production traffic plus inexpensive broadband as backup and overflow.
Fixed wireless is the usual answer — it enters the building by air, so it cannot share a trench with the fiber. Licensed fixed wireless with an SLA runs roughly $200–$500/month for 100 Mbps in most markets and installs in days, not months.