50Mb Leased Line - Why It's Becoming More Popular
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 50Mb Leased Line Provides Plenty Of Bandwidth For SIP Trunking. This Lets Companies Save Money By Ditching Their Expensive ISDN Circuits
The phones in your office connect to a mini telephone exchange in your office, called a PBX. Historically, this PBX was connected to the public phone network using ISDN circuits.
It's now possible to connect your PBX to the phone network using 'SIP Trunking' over the top of standard leased line circuits. Most modern PBXs support SIP straight out of the box.
The calls made using SIP are usually cheaper than the ones made over ISDN. The connectivity's cheaper too. Bit-for-bit, leased lines are far better value than ISDN circuits, and that disparity is only going to get larger as leased line costs fall and ISDN circuit prices stay flat.
The money you're currently spending on ISDN circuits could go towards paying for your 50Mb leased line, reducing the cost of upgrading from what you currently have!
Head Offices Need More Bandwidth, Due to Increased WAN Use By Regional Offices
When companies first rolled out their corporate WANs, the Head Office got the best connection, and the other offices had to make do with rather pathetic 2Mbit/s connections, as anything else would have been too expensive.
As leased line prices have dropped, companies have been able to upgrade these other offices, giving them far faster connections to the WAN provider.
This has created a new bottleneck: the limited bandwidth linking Head Office to the WAN provider's core network. By upgrading the Head Office's connection to a 50Mb Leased Line, this bottleneck can often be eliminated, speeding up WAN traffic not just for the staff at Head Office, but for staff at every office that sends or receives data to Head Office.
Increased Demand For Internet Bandwidth
Back when I was a lad, a few technically savvy companies had a 64Kb connection... and they were grateful for it!
Then 2Mb connections became standard.
Now 10Mb connections are starting to become the default choice. Soon 50Mb leased lines or 100Mb ones could become common.
Why have we seen this big increase in demand? One of the main reasons is that the web sites and services your staff access have become ever more bandwidth hungry. The web sites make more use of video. That video is in higher resolution, and is encoded at higher bit-rates. Streaming radio and music services (which keep some of your colleagues sane) have also upped their bit-rates as cheap broadband has become ubiquitous.
If you don't buy enough bandwidth, staff accessing these services will slow down business-related Internet access. This means it will take longer to download patches for servers and desktops, and take longer to send and receive emails with large attachments.
50Mb Leased Line May Not Become The New Standard
Most 50Mb leased lines are really 100Mb leased lines capped to 50Mb.
So there's not much of a difference in cost between a 50Mb leased line and a 100Mb one.
There is a difference in the cost of the Internet access (100Mb of Internet access costs twice as much as 50Mb of Internet access). However, that's a relatively small proportion of the cost of an 'Internet leased line'.
For this reason, 100Mb leased lines are likely to become the new default speed.
However, if you don't want to pay for the full 100Mbps, you may be able to buy 50Mbps of leased line connectivity over a 100Mbps circuit. This gives you 50Mbit/s of throughput, while giving you the option to double capacity should the need arise - without having to install a replacement circuit.
To find out how much a 50Mb Leased Line would cost you, give us a call on 020 7847 4510. Alternatively, find out how much a 100Mb dedicated connection costs by visiting our free leased line pricing tool.
