Leased Line Charges and Setup costs – Find Out How Much You’ll Have To Pay
Your leased line charges and setup costs depend on:
- Location - Where you want the leased line
- Bandwidth - The speed of the connection
- Contract Length - The number of months for which you agree to rent the leased line
- Additional Services Desired - Whether you want Internet access, SIP Trunking, Traffic Prioritisation added to your leased line
- Resilience Options - Whether you need (and are willing to pay for) a backup connection
For this reason, it's not possible to say a 10Mbit/s leased line will cost you £x/month and have a setup charge of £y.
To find out how much it will cost you, you'll need to contact a salesman at a leased line provider, or use a leased line pricing tool like ours to request a quote.
Your Monthly Leased Line Charges
Leased lines start at about £155/month for 2Mbit/s to some well-connected places in London. The cost can go up to thousands of pounds per month for 1Gbit/s or 10Gbit/s circuits.
Most areas of the UK don't get attractive pricing. The further away you are from the concrete jungles (and pre-laid high-capacity data networks), the more you'll have to pay in rental charges.
If you look out of your office and see green fields, a leased line is likely to cost you the earth.
Predictable Leased Line Setup Costs
The shorter your contract, the more your setup charge is likely to be. For this reason, companies seldom sign a one year contract for a leased line, unless they know they're going to be moving soon. Three to five year contracts are far more typical, as often they come with a far lower setup charge... or no setup charge at all.
Excess Construction Charges
Whenever you order a leased line, your leased line provider leases a circuit from a company that already has a data network in the ground. These companies are called carriers.
The carrier will carry out a survey to determine what has to be done to connect your office to its network. Perhaps it will have to dig for a few meters. Or perhaps it will have to dig for a kilometre.
Perhaps your landlord helpfully agrees to let them install the leased line. Or perhaps your landlord is obstructive and won't let it be installed.The survey figures all these things out.
Based on the survey, the carrier comes back to your leased line provider and says "yes, we will now deliver what you've ordered" or "there's a problem, if you want us to install the circuit you'll need to pay these excess construction charges".
In the event that there are excess construction charges, you usually have the option of refusing to pay them and deciding not to proceed with the leased line order.
I ought to stress that most leased line installations don't incur excess construction charges. They're merely applicable in a sizable minority of cases.
You may think this is ridiculous. That if the carriers quote a price, they should stick to it. And I fully understand where your coming from. But look at the small-print of your quote from a leased line provider and you'll always see the caveat 'subject to survey'. And the excess construction charges and setup costs are the reason why.
It's just as frustrating for your leased line provider. They've invested a lot of time and money to get you to buy that leased line. They've got the carrier to give them a quote, and based on that quote they've quoted you a price in good faith. The last thing they want is for the carrier to come along and mess everything up by demanding thousands of pounds beyond what was budgeted for.
If the excess construction charges are small, your leased line provider may swallow those charges. However, for larger charges your leased line provider may not be able to justify swallowing them. In that case, your provider will pass at least some of the charges on to you, and you'll have to choose whether to pay them or - alternatively - cancel the order.
Find Out How Much Your Leased Line Is Likely To Cost
If you want to know what the leased line charges and setup costs would be for your location, visit www.hso.co.uk/leased-lines/
