Leased lines are the business choice for connectivity, and it’s not surprising why. The huge benefits of having a dedicated connection, shared with no one, with symmetrical upload and download speeds, along with enhanced reliability, makes them the connection of choice for most businesses.
While leased lines can be smaller with speeds of 50Mb or 100Mb, the cost per Mb of connectivity on a 3 year contract term is significantly higher than utilising the latest gigabit technology, or as we term it Gigaconnect. One of the best choices for businesses, right now in 2021, is a 1Gb, Gigaconnect leased line.
If you’ve decided that a leased line is the right choice for your business, there is a lot of choice when it comes to your connection speed. Connections start as low as 50Mb, but typically are 100Mb, 1Gb, 5Gb or 10Gb, even faster in some areas.
With all of this choice, why opt for a 1Gb leased line? It is a fantastic all-rounder offering great bandwidth for most businesses, generally with headroom to support businesses as the data requirement per employee grows. Ever increasingly more products and services require more data usage, with the amount of data used over the Internet forecast to double over the next three years*.
Here are several benefits that come with choosing a 1Gb leased line for your business in 2021.
When people think of their home broadband as ‘superfast’, at up to 80Mb there is generally no slow down or buffering required when online games are played or TV streamed. And whilst a ‘superfast’ connection is perfect for domestic use, businesses with multiple staff generally need more.
With more people operating from a premises, there is more demand on your internet access. If you have multiple teams of people that all need every day, permanently online, permanently fast connectivity, it is worth investing in a high speed connection like a 1Gb leased line. A dedicated leased line straight to your business will never fluctuate or reduce speed during peak usage times, it’s just for your company’s usage and will give bandwidth for the whole company to work efficiently and productively.
With a typical fibre broadband connection, you’ll generally find decent enough download speeds available, however they have much much slower upload speeds. Even the top tier titans of the industry like BT and Virgin tend to max out at around 50Mb.
With a dedicated leased line, you get a symmetrical connection, so on a 1Gb connection you get 1000Mb Upload Speed and 1000Mb download speed, simultaneously. So on a connection like this you get 20x the upload speed of what is possible on a broadband connection. Superfast upload speeds like this are really useful for businesses that use a lot of cloud based software, have to transfer large files, want to make stutter free video calls, work across multiple sites and make off premises backups of their data.
If your business has growth and development plans, be it employing more people or utilising different solutions and increasing your reliance on cloud based software, you’ll need an internet connection that’s got rock solid reliability, capable of supporting your business going forward. If you opt for a smaller connection you could find that your demand quickly exceeds your bandwidth. Hence after discussing solutions with successful businesses, we generally find that a 1Gb leased line strikes the best balance of affordability and scale for most.
With the way that the fibre in the ground is rented to provide the connection on a fixed term contract; should your business be on a 100Mb leased line and require to increase the capacity, unless you were at the end of your contract term the only way to achieve this would be to pay for and install another connection as the bandwidth is capped at the contracted limit. This can be very frustrating to businesses that, for whatever reason, need to increase their internet connectivity. As a 1Gb connection costs slightly more than a 100Mb lease line, by paying the little extra you get 10x the speed – this is why it is the most business friendly option regardless of if you are a small company employing 20 people, an enterprise sized business with 250 people or any sized business in-between.
If you need the ability to flexibly scale your internet connection in line with ambitious growth plans going forward at any time during the fixed contract duration there is a solution for this too. If you opt for a leased line bearer you are giving your business even greater flexibility to grow.
A bearer is pre-agreed extra bandwidth capacity that you can access in the future. With this solution you would pay for, and have access to 1Gb worth of bandwidth as usual. The difference is that you could easily scale up to 2Gb, 3Gb, 5Gb or 10Gb in the future. It’s the ultimate way to futureproof your business connectivity, and is the shrewd choice for growing businesses.
With a dedicated leased line, unlike a broadband connection, you get business grade technical support. Whilst the technology is extremely reliable, sometimes issues can and do occur. The difference is that with a dedicated leased line, there is a 5 hour targeted time of fault resolution from when any fault is reported, anytime day or night, 24/7.
A stark contrast from a broadband connection, where after waiting in a queue to report an issue, whilst the fault would be logged within 5 hours you may be waiting days, sometimes weeks to get the issue resolved. Should you ever encounter an issue, with our Gigabit connection, you’ll immediately get straight through to our own UK based technical support team when you need assistance most.
The answer is nearly always a resounding yes, however sometimes there can be a ‘but’. From our postcode checker a desktop audit is performed looking at surrounding underground ducts from our local exchange to your premises. Depending upon the search results most business can be connected without the industry termed “excess construction charges”, however if your business is remote and for example may require underground ducts installed through neighbouring land, the time and cost taken to achieve the desired outcome can be considerable.
Standard contract lengths are 12 months or 36 months for leased line connections; it is possible to have longer agreements, but not shorter ones with a dedicated fibre leased line.
What Internet Central can do for you on a shorter term, is a deliver a leased line service over a mobile telephone network. With our custom built solution we tether multiple sim cards together to deliver a mobile solution that works exactly the same as a fibre leased line that can be used in the interim when moving into new premises whilst waiting for the installation of your connectivity and/or give decent connectivity in temporary premises or remote locations.
The data consumption is a more expensive as it is chargeable by the terabyte, however for a 2-3 month period, if there is a decent mobile network reception, speeds of 200Mb/s are achievable. Whilst not as good as a 1Gb leased line, putting you first, it allows us to support you in the interim till the right time comes for a permanent installation.
Technology and demand moves fast, which means that a leased line is more affordable than ever to businesses. At Internet Central, by consistent reinvestment into the business (since 1995) we have top of the range hardware in our data centres and exchanges where we will supply your connectivity from.
Our efficiencies allow us to deliver excellent pricing for our growing base of loyal customers, typically at Internet Central a 1Gb leased line costs £349 per month. Considering a BTnet leased line of 100Mb costs £340 per month, you’d only be paying around 5% more for 20 times the bandwidth!
Different suppliers quote different lead times to get your leased lines installed. Regardless of the alleged installation time, around 95% of installations on business leased lines are done by BT Openreach, who install the fibre between the business premises and the exchange in BT ducts. Typically it is 15-30 days, but can be longer dependent upon your location and how complex the installation is.
What Internet Central can offer is an intermediary stopgap solution. It is a leased line service delivered over a mobile telephone network. With our custom built solution we tether multiple sim cards together to deliver a mobile solution that works exactly the same as a fibre leased line and can be used in the interim when moving into new premises whilst waiting for the installation of your connectivity and/or give decent connectivity in temporary premises or remote locations.
The data consumption is a more expensive as it is chargeable by the terabyte and not unlimited as your leased line will be, however for a 2-3 month period, if there is a decent mobile network reception speeds of 200Mb/s are achievable. Whilst not as good as a 1Gb leased line, putting you first, it allows us to support your business in the interim till the permanent installation has taken place.
Despite the fact that a leased line is the most reliable and readily available connectivity for business, generally it is the larger enterprises that have more developed business continuity plans to be used in the event of a business emergency. It is surprising how many businesses that have these plans do not assess what would happen to their business if, for whatever reason, there was a bigger issue such as a national disaster that took out all connectivity in a region. Generally it is our larger customers who are looking for additional resilience of their connectivity and would look at a standby mobile solution to support their connectivity.
Our mobile sim card solution is exactly as described in the sections above for short term connectivity, however when configured for use on a Business Continuity application, after the one off purchase fee – there is a minimal monthly charge for keeping the business data sim cards online, and only additional charges when data is used.
Internet Central’s custom unit, once fully configured, would sit on standby, plugged into your network, ready and waiting for action. In the eventuality of the leased line failing, it is designed to automatically re-route all data via the mobile connectivity solution. As soon as the leased line connection is restored it then automatically hands back over to the leased line and returns to standby mode.
Speeds of up to 200Mb are achievable with this, so whilst not comparable to having a 1Gb connection, it is invaluable solution if for businesses looking for additional resilience in their connectivity. With how we configure the system, as well as being fully automatic, the really clever bit is that it is fully transparent to your firewall. This means that in the eventuality you have to change over to the mobile solution for a period of time, be it for minutes, hours or days, there is no additional security threat as all your existing protocols remain in situ and unchanged.
(* https://www.statista.com/statistics/871513/worldwide-data-created/)
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