The Short Take: "Fiber available" on a listing can mean anything from ready-to-connect to a three-to-six-month, $10,000-to-$50,000 build you pay for. Before signing, ask which carriers already have infrastructure in the building, whether any exclusive locks you in, the install lead time, and the speeds actually delivered (not advertised). You cannot upgrade your way out of a building's internet limits after you sign.
A phrase on a listing that quietly costs companies months and five figures, and the questions that prevent it.
"Fiber available" is one of the most misleading phrases in commercial real estate. It sounds like a settled fact. It is usually a range of possibilities, and some of them are expensive.
At its best, the phrase means the building has multiple carriers with existing fiber infrastructure and competitive pricing, ready to connect. At its worst, it means a carrier is willing to run fiber to the building if the tenant pays for the build. That second version is a three to six month process that can cost $10,000 to $50,000 before a single device is connected.
The gap between those two meanings has derailed more than one move. One medical device company signed a lease on the strength of "high-speed internet available," then learned it meant shared cable service capped at 100 Mbps. Video meetings with East Coast partners were unreliable from day one, and reaching real fiber meant a building investment and months of waiting that no one had budgeted for.
The questions that cut through the phrase
The useful question is not whether fiber is available. It is a few sharper ones, asked before signing:
- Which carriers have physical infrastructure in this building right now? Existing infrastructure is the difference between connecting in weeks and building for months.
- Is there an exclusive agreement? A single-provider exclusive means paying whatever that carrier charges, with no leverage and no alternative, for the length of the lease.
- What is the installation lead time for each carrier? This one number drives the entire move timeline.
- What speeds are actually delivered, not advertised? A building can have fiber and still cap bandwidth per tenant, or share it across businesses so performance sags during peak hours, which is exactly when it is needed most.
Ask for a sample service agreement and current pricing before drawing conclusions. What a listing advertises and what a tenant receives are not always the same thing.
Knowing the numbers helps
A rough baseline makes these conversations concrete. A small office of five to ten people needs at least 100 Mbps, and 250 is more comfortable. A growing business of ten to thirty people needs 250 to 500 Mbps. Larger operations need 500 Mbps to a gigabit. Video-heavy work or large file transfers push those numbers up.
The reason this matters so much at signing is simple. A business that depends on cloud applications, video conferencing, or large file transfers cannot upgrade its way out of a building's limitations after the lease is signed. The ceiling is the ceiling.
Do not forget redundancy
A single internet connection is a single point of failure. For any business where downtime means lost work, lost revenue, or missed client deadlines, and that describes most companies running on cloud applications, a second connection matters. Real redundancy means a secondary line from a different carrier on a genuinely separate physical path into the building. Two connections sharing the same conduit fail together. Whether the building supports true redundancy is worth confirming before signing, not during an outage.
FAQs
What is the difference between fiber and cable internet for a business?
Fiber carries data over glass and delivers the same speed in both directions with steady performance, which is what video calls, backups, and cloud apps depend on. Business cable is usually much slower on upload and is shared across an area, so it sags during busy hours. Those "high-speed internet available" listings often turn out to be shared cable, not fiber.
What is dedicated internet, and do we need it?
Dedicated internet access gives your business its own bandwidth that is not shared with other tenants, usually with a written performance guarantee. Shared or best-effort connections cost less but slow down under load. If your work leans on reliable video, cloud software, or large transfers, the dedicated line is usually worth the premium.
Should internet reliability be guaranteed in writing?
Yes, through a service level agreement, or SLA. A business SLA commits the carrier to an uptime percentage and a repair-time target, with credits if they miss. Consumer-grade plans offer none of that, so a cheap connection can leave you with no recourse during an outage. Ask for the SLA terms before choosing a provider.
Who pays to bring fiber to a building that does not have it?
It depends on what you negotiate. When a carrier has to build fiber to the property, that cost often lands on the tenant unless the landlord agrees to contribute, which is worth raising during lease negotiation rather than after. In a competitive market some landlords will share or cover the build to close the deal, so always ask, and get it in writing.
The takeaway
"Fiber available" is a starting point for questions, not an answer. The carriers, the exclusives, the real speeds, and the lead times are what decide whether a new office connects cleanly or becomes a slow-motion problem.
This is the first of the infrastructure questions covered in Before You Sign, a guide to the technology risks that get decided at lease signing. Ron DeAngelis, president of Jump Start Technology, drew on more than 20 years of Bay Area office moves to write it.
