When comparing OpenAccess products to most other products, you will want to refer to the 'burstable speed' on the OpenAccess product.

Committed Information Rate is when a circuit is configured to have both a 'bare minimum' (the CIR) and 'burstable' speeds. For nearly all of our competitors in the marketplace, their answer to CIR is 'not available'.  Either they do not have it, they can not do it, or they will be charging you prices in excess of $1,000 a month right out the gate.

Traditionally, CIR has been used on Frame Relay circuits, but is also applicable to modern infrastructure and in reality is a necessity for any business that relies on the Internet.

OpenAccess has designed its network to both provide CIR and QoS to customer circuits as needed and maintains a pro-active stance on capacity planning.

For instance, a typical small office using the basic OpenAccess multitenant product will have a CIR of 2mbps and a burstable port speed of 10mbps. What this means, is that generally speaking this customer will see speeds approaching 10mbps on a regular basis, however if there is an unexpected event (equipment failure, extreme network congestion/utilization), the customer's speeds could drop as low as 2mbps, but will never drop below 2mbps.

This is in 100% contrast to most other broadband services out there, particular cable modem, where they tell you are getting a certain speed, but that speed is just the burstable speed, and if your neighbors all decide to use the Internet heavily at the same time, your Internet could be crawling so slow as to be nearly unusable.