Digital Leased Line – What It Is and Why It's Useful To Businesses

Back in the 1950′s, 1960′s and 1970′s a leased line meant a hotline, dedicated old-fashioned analogue telephone line, linking two sites.

However for the past few decades the phrase has come to mean a fixed bandwidth dedicated symmetric digital connection between two sites.

So when people talk of a leased line, they almost always mean a digital leased line. Usually, they mean a point-to-point ethernet circuit.

Digital leased lines offer a number of benefits. Their connection speeds are fixed, so your connection won’t slow down at peak times. They’re symmetric, so you’re more likely to have adequate bandwidth for applications such as telephony, FTPing files, and loading files from a server on another site (and saving them).

The costs of a digital leased line keep falling, as the UK telecoms networks are upgraded, the increased network usage leads to economies of scale. Much of the network makes use of fibre-optic cable. Upgrading it doesn’t usually require that new fibre be laid, just that the equipment at the ends of the fibres be upgraded. It’s not just computers that have been getting faster and cheaper. Networking equipment has to, and this has made it possible to provide digital leased lines for ever smaller monthly fees.