How to check the speed of your leased line, and what to do if you're not happy with the results of that speed test.

We're seeing ever more businesses choose a 50Mb Leased Line. Here's why.

The Price of a 50Mb Leased Line Has Fallen

50Mb leased lines have become cheaper due to advances in optical networking and economies of scale resulting from ISPs investing to meet the increased demand for consumer broadband.

Improvements in electronics have also played a role, reducing the cost of routers and switches, while increasing their performance.

A 10MB leased line is a point-to-point dedicated data connection with a speed of 10Mbit/s available in both directions.

Why are 10MB leased lines so popular?

It’s enough bandwidth for converged communications

10MB is one of the most popular speeds for leased lines, because it provides enough bandwidth to simultaneously carry some Internet traffic, some corporate WAN traffic and some VoIP telephone calls as well. A 2Mbit/s connection would probably struggle with all that lot.

A 100MB leased line is a point-to-point symmetric data connection that offers a connection speed of 100Mbit/s.

Cost Comparison

A 100MB leased line costs about twice as much as 10MB one, which in turn cost just over twice as much as a 2MB connection. As connectivity costs fall, many IT Managers choose to upgrade their company’s connection speed by a factor of 5 or 10, rather than stick with the existing speed and take a price cut.

A 1Gbps Leased Line is a leased line with a connection speed of 1Gbit/s, in other words one that connects at 1000Mbit/s.

You’ve no-doubt seen the ads for ‘super-fast’ broadband at downstream speeds of 20Mbit/s or 50Mbit/s. For home users, that’s super-fast. But businesses that need to replicate or backup vast amounts of data quickly may need something far faster, more symmetrical, and unmetered. And that’s where a 1GB leased line comes in.

1Gbps leased lines are usually used for copying data from a company’s primary data centre to its backup one, for safekeeping.

A 2MB leased line is a point-to-point dedicated data circuit that offers a speed of 2Mbit/s upstream and 2Mbit/s downstream.

The Old Standard?

2MB is the lowest speed offered by most leased line providers.

For many years 2MB was the most popular speed for a leased line. However, as leased line prices fell through the floor, many companies switched to 10MB and 100MB connections rather than take a price cut. However 2MB is still a popular speed for small offices, retail premises, and offices where higher speeds are not available at sensible prices.

DS3 line is a Digital Signal Level 3 T-carrier.

Still none the wiser?

In English, a DS3 line is a 44.736Mbit/s data circuit used in North America, Japan and South Korea.

In the UK, the nearest equivalent is an E3, which transmits at 34.368Mbit/s. However you'll seldom encounter an E3, as Ethernet has now become the de facto standard for WAN connectivity, so if you need 44.7Mbit/s of connectivity, you're likely to pick a 100Mbit/s Ethernet circuit instead.

Leased lines typically have speeds of 1Mbps to 10Gbps.

The most common leased line speed is 2Mbps. However, 10Mbps and 100Mbps are becoming increasingly common.

An OC3 line is a leased line transmitting at 155.52Mbit/s. It has a payload of 148.608Mbit/s, and an overhead of 6.912Mbit/s.

OC stands for Optical Carrier. The '3' refers to the speed: an OC3 line is three times as fast as an OC1 line.

The 'optical' bit refers to a Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET) fiber optic network.