3 September 2026LANTEK Computers
We are not naming providers or quoting prices here, deliberately. Both change, coverage differs street by street, and a recommendation printed in an article is worth less than a current quote for your specific address. What does not change is which questions to ask.
Is business fibre worth it over home fibre?
The most common question, and the honest answer is that it depends on what happens when it breaks.
Home fibre products are generally sold with best-effort support. The line usually works, and when it does not, you are in a queue with residential customers and the repair happens when it happens. For a household that is fine.
Business products typically cost more and differ in three specific ways worth confirming: a stated repair time rather than best effort, contention that is lower or uncontended, so your speed does not sag when the neighbourhood comes home at six, and a static address, which you need if anything at your premises has to be reachable from outside.
Note that the headline speed is often similar. You are not paying for more speed, you are paying for a repair commitment and for consistency. Which means the question to ask yourself is what four hours without connectivity costs your business, and whether that is more or less than the difference in monthly cost.
For a business of three doing email, home fibre is a reasonable commercial decision. For a business whose phones, card machine and accounting system are all on it, the arithmetic changes.
Do we really need a second line?
This is the question where the answer has shifted most, and the reason is that businesses have moved more onto the connection.
When the internet carried email and browsing, an outage was an inconvenience. Now, for many businesses on the North Coast, one connection carries mail, files, the accounting system, the card machine and increasingly the telephones. An outage does not degrade the business, it stops it.
A second connection is worth having when the answer to what stops without it is most things. Two points about how to do it:
Use a different medium, not a second fibre from a different reseller. Two fibre services may run down the same physical infrastructure, so a cut takes both. A fibre line plus a mobile connection fails independently, which is the entire point.
Make sure it fails over automatically. A backup line that somebody has to reconfigure a router to use is not failover, it is a spare part. Ask specifically whether it switches without intervention, and ask them to demonstrate it by unplugging the primary.
A mobile backup does not need to carry the whole business. It needs to carry the phones, the card machine and mail, which is a much smaller requirement and a much smaller cost.
Our estate or business park only allows one provider. What now?
Common here, given how much of the North Coast is inside developments, and there is usually more room than it appears.
The restriction is normally about who may install infrastructure in the development, not about which services you may buy. So the first question is whether the network operator in your estate is open access, meaning multiple service providers can sell over the same physical line. Often the answer is yes, and you can change provider without touching the infrastructure.
Second, a wireless or mobile backup usually sits outside the restriction entirely, because nothing is being dug or installed.
Third, ask the body corporate or park management what the actual rule says rather than accepting a summary of it. In our experience the written rule is frequently narrower than the version everybody repeats.
Why is it slow at four o’clock but fine at nine?
Usually one of two things, and they are distinguishable.
Contention on the line. If a residential-grade product is shared with a neighbourhood, performance sags when everybody gets home. A business product with lower contention addresses it.
Something inside your own network. Backups running during the day, cloud file sync catching up, or somebody uploading something large. This is more common than people expect, and it is fixable without changing provider by scheduling the heavy work outside business hours and prioritising what matters.
Voice is the sensitive case. If calls degrade while everything else seems fine, that is a prioritisation problem on your own network rather than a line problem, and it is ordinary work to fix. Teams Phone instead of a PABX covers why.
What happens to the internet during load shedding?
Frequently overlooked, and it is the question that catches businesses out.
Your fibre router needs power. So does the switch it plugs into. If neither is on battery, your connection is down whether or not the fibre itself is fine, and whether or not your laptops have charge.
Beyond your premises, the infrastructure between you and your provider also needs power, and it may or may not have backup. Worth asking your provider directly what their position is at the equipment serving your area, and treating a vague answer as an answer.
Router and switch on a small battery is one of the cheapest and highest-value purchases on this page. What load shedding does to your data puts it in order against everything else.
Questions to ask before signing anything
Whoever you are talking to, and get the answers in writing.
What is the repair commitment, and is it a commitment or a target? What is the contention ratio? Is the address static? What is the contract term and the notice period? Is installation free only if we sign for a longer term? Does the price change after an introductory period? If we later want a second line for failover, will your router support it?
That last one saves a replacement six months later.
The thing that matters more than the line
A faster connection does not fix a network that was never designed. If the switch is old, the cabling was crimped by hand, or the wireless was added a point at a time, upgrading the line changes nothing that anybody notices.
Worth having somebody look at what is inside the building before spending more on what comes into it.
What we cover is on IT Infrastructure, and our Ballito office on IT support in Ballito. If you want an opinion on whether a second line is worth it for your specific setup, telephone us and we will tell you what actually stops without one.