Lease Lines - How To Pick The Right One For Your Business
Lease lines can provide your business with the fast, reliable connection it deserves. But how do you pick the right one? There are five key things to consider...
Cost of your Lease Line
Lease Lines cost thousands of pounds per year, and the price can vary greatly between different suppliers. This is because some only get quotes from their preferred carrier, whereas others are free to get quotes from multiple carriers, picking the best value option.
The Installation Time
It typically takes between 35 and 65 working days to install lease lines. So it's essential that you plan ahead and order lease lines several months before you need them to go live.
If you've left it a bit late, you may wish to consider using lease lines based on Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM). Copper EFM circuits are usually far quicker to install than fibre lease lines. Though bear in mind that these only offer 10Mbit/s of connectivity, so they're not a viable substitute to higher bandwidth connections.
SIP Trunking and Converged Communication
If you're thinking about ordering one or more lease lines, and you have ISDN circuits, you should be considering SIP Trunking.
Why waste money paying for ISDN circuits to carry your phone calls, when you could send those calls over your lease line instead? That money you are currently wasting on ISDN rental charges could subsidise the cost of your new lease line connection.
Check that the provider of your new lease lines can provide SIP Trunking, so you can take advantage of this subsidy, and the lower call costs that SIP Trunking can bring.
Lease Line Resilience Options
If connection downtime would cost your business dear, you need to consider getting a backup connection.
Typically, to save money, this connection will be inferior to your main connection. For example, you might decide to have a standard business ADSL connection as a backup circuit to your lease line.
If a cheap asymmetric contended ADSL circuit is unacceptable, then you might consider getting a lower bandwidth lease line instead. For example, if you were ordering a 100Mbit/s lease line, you might choose to have a 10Mbit/s lease line as your backup option. For resilience purposes, you would also want to ensure that the two lease lines use circuits from different underlying carriers.
Make sure that your lease lines come from a supplier who can provide you with the resilience your business needs.
WAN expertise
If your business has multiple sites (or expects to have them soon), look to get your lease lines from a provider experienced in delivering Wide Area Networks.
Instead of buying Internet lease lines to each site, many savvy businesses will buy a corporate WAN and get other services (such as Internet access and SIP Trunking) delivered over the top of it. This provides greater flexibility, as the bandwidth to each site can be shared between a variety of different services, with lesser priority services able to use the spare capacity that higher-priority services aren't using.
