Business Internet, Fiber & SD-WAN
Your carrier sold you the circuit they already had in the ground.
Not the one your applications needed — the one that was easy for them to sell.
Business Internet, Fiber & SD-WAN, Quoted Across 200+ Providers
We define the requirement first, then put it out to more than 200 providers — fiber, dedicated internet, fixed wireless, SD-WAN overlay. They run the site survey and the install. We run the comparison and manage them until it works.
What Your Network Is Quietly Costing You
Circuits renew at yesterday's price while the market moves without you.
The Network Decides How Everything Else Performs
Once voice, ERP, file storage, and security all run through the same pipe, the network stops being a utility line item and starts being the thing that determines whether the business runs smoothly or fights itself. The trap is that carrier availability is wildly uneven building to building across the St. Louis metro — the provider with the best price on a Clayton office tower may not serve a warehouse in Earth City, and the one that does may quote a 90-day build. Gateway checks serviceability across the full carrier set at every one of your addresses, from St. Louis City and County out through St. Charles, O'Fallon, Chesterfield, and Metro East Illinois, then designs the architecture around what is actually available, what your applications need, and what you are willing to spend.
- Fiber, ethernet, dedicated internet
- SD-WAN, backup circuits, 5G failover
- MPLS where it still fits
- Broadband, fixed wireless, 4G/5G
- Business continuity & failover
- Direct cloud interconnect
- Multi-site & branch connectivity
- Managed router & edge equipment
- Bandwidth upgrades & circuit consolidation
- Serviceability checks at every address
- Install scheduling & carrier project management
What Business Internet Costs in St. Louis — and What Drives the Price
Circuit pricing is never published, which is why this is the hardest question to get a straight answer to. Here are the ranges we actually see in this market, and the four things that move them.
Business broadband
Cable or fiber-to-the-premises on a shared network. Roughly $80 to $400 a month depending on speed and location. Fine as a primary connection for a smaller office, and increasingly common as a backup circuit alongside dedicated fiber.
Dedicated internet access
A committed, symmetrical circuit with a real SLA. Typically $400 to $1,500 a month in the metro for common bandwidth tiers. You are paying for guaranteed throughput and contractual restoration times, not headline speed.
SD-WAN overlay
Usually priced per site per month on top of the circuits, often $75 to $300 depending on the platform and whether management is included. It frequently pays for itself by letting you replace expensive circuits with cheaper ones.
Four things drive where you land in those ranges. Your address matters more than anything else — a building already lit with fiber prices very differently from one that needs construction. Bandwidth and commitment move the number, but not linearly; the jump from 100M to 500M often costs far less than people expect. Contract term is the biggest lever most buyers never pull, with 36- and 60-month terms carrying materially better rates than 12. And construction is the wildcard: if fiber has to be built to your suite, a carrier may waive some or all of that cost against a longer term, or quote five figures if the build is long. We get all four priced across competing carriers before you commit to anything.
How We Design and Source a Network
Circuit pricing is not published, availability changes block by block, and no single carrier will tell you when a competitor serves you better. This is how we get past that.
Requirements & Sites
Every address, what runs at each one, real bandwidth consumption versus what you are paying for, uptime tolerance, and which locations genuinely need diversity rather than just wanting it.
Serviceability Check
We run every address against the full carrier set — including regional fiber providers most businesses never hear from — to find who can actually deliver, at what speed, and how long the build takes.
Architecture & Pricing
Design the topology, then take it to market. You get competing quotes normalized to the same scope, with install intervals, term options, and SLA credits shown side by side.
Install & Ongoing Support
We manage orders, build intervals, and turn-up across multiple carriers, then stay on as the escalation path when a circuit goes down and the support line is not moving.
What We Source: Business Internet, Fiber, SD-WAN and Backup
From a single-site internet upgrade in Chesterfield to a multi-state SD-WAN refresh, sourced across the full carrier and provider market.
Dedicated Internet Access
Symmetrical, SLA-backed fiber and ethernet with committed bandwidth and real repair commitments — the difference that matters when voice and cloud applications run over the same connection.
SD-WAN
Application-aware routing across multiple circuits, centralized policy, and sub-second failover. Frequently pays for itself by letting cheaper broadband carry traffic that used to need premium bandwidth.
Broadband, Fixed Wireless & 5G
Cost-effective secondary paths, fast-turnup connectivity for new locations, and wireless backup that keeps a site running when the fiber is cut.
MPLS Where It Still Fits
It is not dead everywhere. Some traffic profiles and some site mixes still justify it, and we will say so rather than pushing a rip-and-replace that does not pencil out.
Continuity & Failover
Diverse-path design, automatic failover, and honest answers about which sites need it — because paying for diversity that shares the same conduit is a common and expensive mistake.
Cloud Interconnect
Direct private connections into AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud for predictable performance on workloads where the public internet is not good enough.
Connecting Multiple Locations Across the Metro — and Beyond
Multi-site is where carrier shopping gets genuinely difficult, because availability is decided building by building. The provider that serves your headquarters in Clayton may have nothing at your warehouse in Earth City, and the one that reaches the warehouse may not touch your St. Charles office. Most companies solve this by signing three separate contracts with three carriers on three renewal dates, then spend years managing the mess.
We approach it the other way around. We check serviceability at every address first, then design around what is actually available — usually a primary carrier where they are strong, alternates where they are not, and an SD-WAN overlay that makes the mixed footprint behave like one network. Where it makes sense we align contract terms so everything renews together instead of staggering across the calendar.
This applies whether your sites sit inside the metro or spread across states. The sourcing work is the same, and so is the outcome: one point of contact, one design, and pricing negotiated across the whole footprint rather than one circuit at a time.
Business Internet and SD-WAN Across the St. Louis Metro
Serviceability is local, so our knowledge is too. What is available, what it costs, and how long a build takes all change by corridor.
St. Louis City & Downtown
Dense carrier presence and multiple data centers, which means real competition on price — but multi-tenant buildings often have a single riser owner that limits who can actually reach your suite.
Clayton
Class A office and professional services. Generally well served, and usually the right place to put the primary circuit in a multi-site design.
Chesterfield & West County
Chesterfield Valley office parks vary widely building to building. Two addresses a quarter mile apart can have completely different options and timelines.
St. Charles & St. Peters
The 636 growth corridor saw major business fiber construction over the last several years, so options here are often better than businesses expect.
O'Fallon, MO
Built out deliberately during that same expansion, alongside continued new construction. Worth checking before assuming your only choice is the incumbent.
Maryland Heights & Earth City
The Riverport corridor — warehouse, distribution, and light manufacturing. Fiber availability is genuinely uneven here, which makes an address check essential rather than optional.
Metro East, Illinois
Edwardsville, O'Fallon IL, Belleville and the surrounding communities. Fewer local advisors work this side of the river, and carrier footprints differ from Missouri.
Elsewhere in the metro
Fenton, Creve Coeur, Des Peres, Ballwin, Kirkwood, Town & Country, Bridgeton, Hazelwood, Cottleville and Wentzville — same process, same sourcing.
Common Questions
What is the difference between dedicated internet and business broadband?
Dedicated internet gives you a committed, symmetrical amount of bandwidth with a service level agreement and a contractual repair window. Broadband is shared and best-effort, with upload speeds usually a fraction of download. Broadband is fine for a lot of uses and a good secondary path. It is a poor primary connection for a business running voice, a contact center, or cloud-hosted core applications.
Do we need SD-WAN?
If you have one location and one circuit, probably not. It starts earning its cost at three or more sites, or anywhere you want to combine an inexpensive secondary circuit with a primary and have traffic move between them automatically. The savings usually come from what it lets you stop buying, not from the product itself.
How long does a fiber install take?
If the building is already lit, thirty to forty-five days is typical. If construction is required it can run 90 to 180 days or longer depending on permits and how far the fiber has to come. We surface build intervals in the quote stage so nobody signs expecting a date that was never realistic.
Our carrier says we are the only option at our address.
That is often what they believe, because they only check their own network. Regional and wholesale fiber providers serve far more buildings than most businesses realize. Checking costs you nothing and it is one of the more common places we find real money.
Can you help with an existing circuit that keeps going down?
Yes. Chronic circuit problems and unmoving trouble tickets are a normal reason to call. We can escalate on your behalf, and if the answer turns out to be a different carrier we will source that instead.
How much does business internet cost per month in St. Louis?
Business cable generally runs $50 to $150 a month. Shared business fiber lands roughly $120 to $400 depending on speed. Dedicated internet access, the symmetrical SLA-backed kind, typically starts around $400 and runs past $1,500 for higher capacity. Those are honest ranges, not quotes. The same 500 Mbps circuit can differ by hundreds of dollars a month between two buildings a mile apart, because it depends on which carriers already have fiber in the ground at your address. Budget also for what does not appear on the advertised rate: equipment fees, install charges, and post-promotional price jumps commonly add twenty to forty percent to the real monthly cost.
How much internet speed does my business actually need?
A workable starting estimate is 3 Mbps per employee for email, browsing, and cloud documents, or 10 Mbps per employee if video calls are constant. A twenty-person office doing heavy video lands near 200 Mbps. What matters more than the download number is upload. Cloud backups, file transfers, video meetings, and hosted phone systems all push traffic upward, and a cable plan advertising 500 Mbps down may only give you 20 up. That asymmetry, not raw speed, is what most slow-office complaints actually trace back to.
Who are the business internet providers in St. Louis?
Most businesses know AT&T and Spectrum. Depending on the address you may also reach Brightspeed, Gateway Fiber, i3 Broadband, Socket, Bluebird Network, Stratus Networks, or Uniti Fiber, along with national carriers like Lumen and Comcast Business. There is also a business-only fiber network across greater St. Louis that almost nobody has heard of, because it never markets to consumers. Roughly a thousand route miles were built through downtown St. Louis, St. Louis County, St. Charles County, O'Fallon and the Metro East starting in 2020 under Everstream, and Segra acquired that network in 2025 and operates it today. If your building sits near that footprint you may have a genuine option nobody has ever quoted you. The practical answer is that the list of providers in St. Louis matters far less than the list of providers at your specific building, and those two lists are rarely the same.
Can we just use residential internet for our business?
For a very small office with a handful of people doing email and browsing, sometimes yes, and we will tell you so rather than sell you something heavier. What you give up is the repair commitment. Residential service is best-effort with no service level agreement, so a Tuesday outage puts you in the same queue as everyone else on the street. Once your phones, card processing, or core applications live in the cloud, that queue becomes the real cost.
What is an SLA, and does my connection have one?
A service level agreement is the carrier contractually committing to an uptime percentage and a repair window, with bill credits owed when they miss. Dedicated internet access includes one. Business broadband and cable almost never do, whatever the sales sheet implies. The number that matters is not the uptime percentage but the mean time to repair, because that is what determines whether an outage costs you an hour or costs you two days.
Is 5G fast enough to use as backup internet?
For most offices, yes. Mid-band 5G typically delivers 100 to 300 Mbps with latency in the 25 to 35 millisecond range, which comfortably carries voice, card processing, email, and cloud applications while the primary circuit is down. Plans generally run $50 to $150 a month and failover happens in roughly fifteen to thirty seconds with the right router. The one thing to verify before committing is signal at your actual building, not the coverage map for your ZIP code.
Do two internet providers give us real redundancy?
Not automatically, and this is the most common expensive mistake we see. Two carriers frequently ride the same physical path into a building, or lease from the same underlying network, so one backhoe takes both down at once. Real redundancy needs three things: genuinely diverse physical paths, a secondary circuit actually sized to carry your critical traffic rather than a token DSL line, and automatic health-check failover instead of manual switching. Paying for two bills that share one conduit is not redundancy, it is two bills.
What does it cost to get fiber to a building that is not already connected?
If fiber is close, construction often runs a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars, and many carriers will absorb some or all of it in exchange for a longer term. If the build is substantial, a carrier may quote five figures or simply decline. This is exactly where checking multiple carriers pays, because a provider whose fiber already runs down your street has no build cost at all while the one you called first is quoting a trench. We surface both the construction charge and the build interval before you sign anything.
AT&T is retiring copper in our area. What do we need to replace?
Missouri has well over a hundred AT&T wire centers in the retirement program, and it is happening wire center by wire center, so two buildings in the same suburb can have completely different timelines. On the connectivity side, any DSL or legacy copper-fed circuit still carrying business traffic needs a fiber or fixed wireless replacement planned rather than waited on. Separately, analog lines running elevators, fire alarm panels, and security systems need their own migration path, because those are not automatically replaced when the copper goes away. Send us a bill and we will identify which of your services are exposed.
We're opening a second location. When should we start on internet?
Earlier than feels necessary — start 90 to 120 days before you need service live. If the building is already lit, turn-up can happen in a few weeks. If fiber has to be built to the suite, permitting and construction routinely push the interval past 90 days and sometimes past 180, and that clock does not start until the contract is signed. The expensive version of this is signing a lease, discovering in month two that the only carrier serving the building needs six months, and running the office on a hotspot until it lands. Send us the address as soon as you are seriously considering the space. Checking serviceability costs nothing, and it occasionally changes which suite a company picks.
Find Out What Is Actually Available at Your Buildings
Send us your St. Louis-area addresses and a current bill. We will come back with what every serving carrier can deliver, at what price, on what timeline — including the ones nobody has told you about.
Book a CallGet Competing Quotes
Tell us what you're running and we'll bring competing bids from 200+ providers — at no cost to you.
No cost, no obligation. Gateway Telecom Advisors is paid by the provider you select.