What Dedicated Network Covers
A dedicated network at Verizon Business is a committed-throughput underlay plus an optional SD-WAN overlay plus optional private on-ramps into the major public clouds. The common shape at a large enterprise is a DIA circuit as the underlay at headquarters and at data-centre-adjacent sites, a mix of Fios and 5G Business Internet at branch offices, all stitched together with a managed SD-WAN overlay from Network Solutions. Cloud-bound traffic takes the private on-ramp rather than the public internet.
This architecture matters when workloads have hard performance constraints. A trading floor cannot tolerate 50 milliseconds of round-trip latency; a medical imaging facility cannot tolerate packet loss that corrupts DICOM transfers; a production film studio cannot tolerate jitter that breaks real-time colour-correction streams. DIA is the answer to each of those, and the SD-WAN overlay extends deterministic performance out to branch sites that run on commodity internet underneath.
Network Snapshot
- DIA Ethernet tails from 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps with hard-SLA packet loss, latency, jitter.
- DWDM wavelengths 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps for metro-connect and data-centre fabric.
- Managed SD-WAN overlay with per-application policy and sub-second failover.
- AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute and Google Cloud Interconnect on-ramps.
- Four-nines-plus uptime, sub-2-ms intra-metro latency, sub-1-ms jitter.
DIA: The Committed Underlay
DIA is the dedicated internet access underlay — committed throughput with no contention, measured handoff-to-handoff. Ethernet tails are sold in increments of 100 Mbps up to 10 Gbps; higher tiers run on wavelength services up to 100 Gbps per wavelength, with DWDM multiplexing available for multi-hundred-gigabit needs. The handoff is a 1000BASE-T, 10GBASE-LR or 100GBASE-LR4 optical port on a carrier-grade multiplexer placed in the customer demarc closet.
DIA installs run longer than Fios or 5G — 45 to 90 business days from signed order to accepted circuit, driven largely by last-mile Ethernet build and cross-connect sequencing at the carrier hotel. Lead time shortens considerably for sites already served by a carrier building entry; it extends where fresh fiber construction is required. SLA measurement begins at circuit acceptance and credit-on-miss computation starts on the first day of billing.
SD-WAN: The Overlay Intelligence
SD-WAN sits over the underlay and enforces application policy. A managed SD-WAN edge at each site measures path health continuously — latency, jitter, packet-loss, reachability — and routes each traffic flow down the path that best meets the application's SLA policy. Voice traffic runs on the lowest-jitter path; bulk replication runs on the highest-throughput path; administrative traffic uses any healthy path. When the primary path degrades below policy threshold, flows are rerouted within sub-second windows without session drop.
Managed SD-WAN from Network Solutions bundles the SD-WAN edge hardware, the regional controller, the 24/7 NOC, change-management, policy tuning and a dashboard in My Verizon. Customers who prefer to operate their own SD-WAN can do so — Verizon Business supplies the underlay, the customer supplies and runs the overlay — with no lock-in to a specific SD-WAN vendor.
| Service | Circuit Type | Target Latency (RTT) | Target Jitter |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIA Ethernet Metro | 1G / 10G Ethernet tail | < 2 ms intra-metro | < 1 ms |
| DIA Ethernet Long-Haul | 10G Ethernet tail | < 50 ms coast-to-coast | < 2 ms |
| DWDM Wavelength | 10G / 100G wave | < 1 ms intra-metro | < 0.5 ms |
| Managed SD-WAN | Overlay on any underlay | Policy-based | Policy-based, sub-second failover |
| Cloud On-Ramp | VLAN sub-if or dedicated wave | < 5 ms to hyperscaler edge | < 1 ms |
Private Cloud On-Ramps
Private connectivity into AWS, Azure and Google Cloud is provisioned as a layer-2 VLAN off the DIA underlay or as a dedicated wavelength. AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute and Google Cloud Interconnect each have specific attachment models — Verizon Business maintains cross-connect presence at the hyperscaler peering locations and provisions the attachment off the customer's DIA tail. Traffic stays off the public internet end-to-end, which materially improves latency, throughput and security posture for large cloud workloads.
Typical use cases include hybrid-cloud data replication, VDI to cloud-hosted endpoints, SAP S/4HANA in Azure with on-premises integration, and S3 replication from on-premises Storage Gateway to Amazon. Pricing is a combination of the hyperscaler's port fee, the Verizon Business cross-connect fee and the underlying DIA capacity. Lead time after DIA acceptance runs 15 to 30 business days pending hyperscaler cross-connect approval.
We run DIA into our Rochester headquarters with a 10 Gbps Ethernet tail and Azure ExpressRoute off the same circuit. The hard SLA on jitter and latency is what lets our specialty dental imaging workflow push large DICOM files without re-transmits and lost frames. Our SD-WAN overlay extends the SLA to seven smaller clinics on Fios primaries.
Design Patterns and Diverse Failover
Large enterprise designs almost always include diverse failover — two independent paths, ideally from two different physical entry points, so that a single fiber cut does not isolate the site. At headquarters this frequently means two DIA tails from two different carrier buildings; at branches it often means one Fios circuit plus one 5G Business Internet gateway or one DIA plus one Fios. The SD-WAN overlay treats both paths as active and load-shares by policy, with automatic cutover when one path degrades.
Voice traffic runs through Business Voice hosted SIP over the SD-WAN overlay with MOS-score monitoring. Because the overlay routes voice over whichever underlay has the best jitter at any moment, MOS scores remain comfortably above 4.0 even when one underlay is degraded. E911 compliance is preserved across the overlay via a registered location for each session border controller.
Operational Surface
Day-to-day operation of the dedicated network runs through the same My Verizon dashboard used for wireless, Fios and IoT. Circuit health, SLA running totals, trouble tickets, change-management windows and SD-WAN overlay telemetry are all visible to the primary administrator. Network-operations administrators can be role-scoped to the DIA circuits only; they would not see wireless line assignments or device inventory under that scope.
Trouble tickets on DIA circuits route to the enterprise NOC queue with four-hour single-site MTTR targets under the hard SLA. Change-management windows for configuration updates follow an ITIL-aligned process with a customer-approved change advisory board for risk-class A and B changes. Audit trails are retained for 365 days and are available to the customer's external auditors during SOC 2 Type II reviews. FTC privacy framework governs customer data handling.