100mb Leased Line – Why Smart Companies Are Choosing To Get One
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.
For years, 2MB was the standard leased line connection speed. But in recent years, given we’ve seen many companies switch to 10MB or 100MB connections, because those connections aren’t much more expensive.
Delivered Over Fibre
A 100MB leased line is delivered over a fibre-optic network. In theory, there is an alternative, to use a mixture of fibre to the street cabinet and copper from there to your office. However, as I write this in late 2010, no-one in the UK is offering this. This hybrid model, so called Fibre To The Curb will initially be used to offer speeds of 40Mbit/s downstream and 10Mbit/s upstream. However, that’s far below the 100MBit/s you’d get upstream AND downstream from a 100MB leased line.
Why 100MB? You may be wondering why companies need 100MB. Surely 10MB would be enough? Not necessarily. There are several reasons why people choose a 100MB leased line
Rising Demand for Internet bandwidth
Internet access has become a standard perk for office employees. As the consumer ISPs have offered speeds averaging 5.2Mbps downstream per user, news, media and video web sites have started offering higher-definition video. At lunchtime, when dozens of employees try to view such sites, the old-fashioned 2MB connections simply can’t cope, and this impacts business-related web traffic
Bulky Patches and Virus Definition Updates
Companies want their PCs fully patched, and virus-protected, in a timely manner. Often this involves all PCs on your network downloading a host of patches and virus definition updates, on the same night. This can easily max out a small Internet connection.
Replacement of ISDN Trunks with SIP Trunks
Companies are switching the way their phones are connected to the telephone network. Instead of sending calls over old-fashioned ISDN30 circuits, these companies are using their leased lines (and sip trunks) to carry the calls. A 30 channel ISDN30 circuit provides about 2Mbit/s of bandwidth. As leased line costs have fallen, ISDN has started to look comparatively expensive. Many firms find it more cost-effective to get rid of one or more of their ISDN circuits, and to reallocate the ISDN rental costs to paying towards a higher bandwidth leased line, over which SIP trunks can be run.
Increased WAN Utilisation
Many companies leased lines are part of a corporate WAN that generates a lot of office-to-office traffic. Homeworking solutions also generate traffic between the office and employees home computers.
