Lease Line - How to Pick The Right One
Your lease line will cost you over £10,000 over the life of your contract, so it's important to choose your supplier carefully. Here are some factors to ensure you get the right deal:
Will your business be moving over the next three years?
The best lease line pricing is reserved for companies that sign three to five year contracts. If you can sign a contract of that length, you're likely to get significantly better pricing than if you sign up for one or two years.
Is your bandwidth usage growing rapidly?
It takes about three months to install a new lease line. So if your company expects bandwidth usage to increase substantially over the life of your lease line contract, it may be worth ordering a larger capacity circuit.
For example, if you using 8Mbps of the capacity on its 10Mbps lease line, and your bandwidth use is growing substantially, it may be unwise to sign a three-year contract for a 10Mbit/s lease line to be delivered over a 10Mbit/s bearer circuit. A better option might be to sign for a 10Mbit/s lease line delivered over a 100Mbit/s circuit. That way, when you max out your lease line, you won't have to wait months for a new larger circuit to be provisioned. You just need to call your ISP and upgrade. There's no need for a new circuit.
Do you need a backup connection, in case your lease line goes down?
Lease lines are more reliable than ADSL connections. But they still go down occasionally.
If connection downtime would be highly disruptive to your business, it may be worth getting a backup connection (e.g. an ADSL one), to reduce the impact of your lease line going down.
If downtime is costly, you may also want to get your lease line from a provider that offers 24x7 support. This enables your ISP to fix some faults after you've gone home, instead of leaving them till the following day. 24x7 support also makes it easier for your lease line provider to minimise the disruption caused by network maintenance, as they can carry out the work at times when few of your company's employees will notice the downtime.
Do you plan to switch from ISDN30 to SIP Trunking?
The phones on your desk connect to a box at your office called a PBX. The PBX connects to the phone network, often by using ISDN2 or ISDN30 circuits.
There's now a cheaper, more scalable alternative to ISDN called SIP Trunking. It sends your calls over a data circuit, such as a leased line.
If you have an ISDN30 and you're looking to get a new leased line, you should seriously consider switching to SIP. Some of the money you're currently paying for your ISDN circuits could go towards subsidising your new lease line, enabling you to get a higher-bandwidth connection. Some of this extra bandwidth would be used for carrying your phone calls. However, most of it would free for other uses.
So check that your lease line provider can provide SIP Trunking.
