Leased Line Guide – Getting Great Connectivity For Your Business

A leased line is a dedicated, symmetric fixed-bandwidth connection between two sites.

Businesses use leased lines to connect their offices to the Internet, and to connect offices to other offices.

A leased line is a dedicated connection. That means that the bandwidth is reserved solely for use by one company. The connection won't slow down at peak times.

Leased lines are symmetric. They can send data just as quickly as they can receive it. That contrasts with most ADSL connections which offer a fast download speed but a very slow upload speed.

A leased line can provide you with higher speeds than you can get from an ADSL connection. For example, you can probably get a 100Mbit/s, 1000Mbit/s or even a 10,000Mbit/s leased line. ADSL can't get remotely close to those speeds.

Most leased lines are provisioned over fibre-optic networks. These transmit data using light that passes through glass fibres. DSL connections send data using electrical signals sent over ordinary phone lines. Unfortunately, the signal on a DSL connection degrades materially the further you get from your local telephone exchange. The signal on a fibre leased line hardly degrades at all, so fibre leased lines can often provide fast reliable connections to businesses that have previously found ADSL to be slow or unreliable at their location.