Leased Line Suppliers – The Main UK Ones, and What They Actually Do

There are a large number of leased line suppliers in the UK. These include BT (retail), Virgin Media Business, hSo, Colt, Thus, Easynet, Managed Communications, Eclipse, Opal, Entanet, Managed Comms and Zen.

Leased line suppliers usually lease circuits from telecoms carriers, and build services upon those basic point-to-point connections.

The carriers dig up the pavements and roads as required,  physically install fibre-optic or copper circuits, seek the required permissions from the landlord, test the circuit and repair/troubleshoot any physical issues with the circuits. Many carriers do not sell directly to end-users.

Your leased line supplier handles the solution design, router purchase, router configuration, connection monitoring, billing, installation charge subsidy, equipment subsidy, first-line support, fault management, and all sales and marketing.

A leased line is a point-to-point dedicated symmetric data connection. However, that's not what most companies want. They want dedicated Internet access, or a corporate WAN, not a collection of point-to-point leased lines. A leased line provider will be able to add Internet access on top of the circuit, and they can connect your leased-lines together to form a corporate WAN that works straight out of the box.