Leased Line Services – Great Connectivity For Your Business
Leased line services can provide your business with a fast, point-to-point, dedicated, symmetric, fixed bandwidth connection.
You can use them to connect your office to the Internet, or to link your offices to each other.
Leased line services come in a wide range of speeds, from a relatively slow 2Mbit/s up to blazingly fast 10Gbit/s.
Your leased line provider may use several different technologies to provide your leased lines. Fibre-optic cable can be used for almost all speeds. At the lowest speeds, DSL technologies like SDSL may occasionally be used, if you're not too far from your local telephone exchange, and your exchange has been appropriately enabled.
Leased line services are incredibly popular with businesses, because they offer a much better connection than the standard contended ADSL services:
ADSL services are usually contended. As other customers use their connection, yours may slow down, as those other customers are grabbing some of the backhaul bandwidth you'd be using. Leased line services are dedicated, so there's no need to share your bandwidth with other customers.
Many ADSL providers boast about download speeds of 'Up to 8Mbps!' or 'Up to 20Mbps!'. What they stay silent about is how pathetically low their upload speeds are. Most ADSL connections offer 0.8Mbps upstream. Leased line services offer a symmetric service, so a 2Mbit/s leased line will offer an upload speed of 2Mbit/s.
ADSL services boast of high download speeds 'up to 20Mbps!', yet most businesses are too far away from their local telephone exchange to get those speeds. According to the UK telecoms regulator OFCOM, the average download speed of an 'Up to 20Mbps' DSL connection is 6.5Mbit/s. Leased line services actually deliver the headline speed you signed up for. A 20Mbps connection transmits data (including headers etc) at 20Mbps, not 5.9Mbps downstream and 0.8Mbps upstream!
Leased line services are usually more reliable than most ADSL connections. This is why Leased line Providers offer far better Service Level Agreements than ADSL providers.
