A quick guide to leased lines

Leased lines are the main alternative to broadband and are considered to be the best option for medium to large businesses, and those that need a truly reliable internet connection or very fast speeds.

Things to consider with leased lines:

• Considerably more expensive than broadband
• Can take up to 90 days to install
• Usually have a longer contract term
• Provides an ‘uncontended’ connection, so that the line is dedicated for your use and not shared with anyone
• ‘Symmetric’, meaning the up and down speed are the same, which is great for VoIP call quality
• Usually have a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which tends to result in faster fix time, refund backed guarantees, and generally higher reliability
• Usually a proactively monitored service, so any problems get spotted and resolved faster
• Well suited to combinations of product, such as secondary lines and mobile data to provide redundancy and backup

EoFTTC (Ethernet over FTTC): a more modern low cost leased line option, providing typical speeds of around 20Mbps. It provides a lot of the benefits of leased lines, delivered over FTTC technology to reduce the cost. It is often used as a reliable backup to other forms of leased line. Suitable for small businesses and backups, where reliability and stability is more important than speed.

Fibre Ethernet (FEthernet): the gold standard and most reliable form of internet connection available, providing speeds of anything from 20Mbps up to a blistering 10Gbps. Suitable for all business, providing reliability, stability and speed.

Fibre Ethernet connections are the basic building blocks of business internet connections. They can also be used in conjunction with secondary fibre ethernet connections, EFM, mobile broadband, etc. to provide resilient connections with automatic failover to a backup line.

What about home workers or multiple sites?

Multi-site networks, whether those are offices, retail stores, or large numbers of home workers can provide a day-to-day challenge. In these cases, network design becomes an important consideration, above and beyond just internet access.

There are lots of technologies that build on simple internet connections, like SD-WAN, MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) and VPN (Virtual Private Network), that can provide fast, reliable, and most importantly, secure business networks.

At PurpleUC we don’t just provide Internet connections, we have a Microsoft Tier 1 IT provider in the family, so we can design and build entire networks for you too.