What Are The Benefits Of A Leased Line For Businesses?

by Abhishek Kumar blogger

When it’s time to upgrade your business broadband, it’s worth considering whether your business might benefit from upgrading to a leased line. The best business broadband providers will have a range of broadband options available which should include leased lines, alongside FTTP and FTTC lines.

What Is A Leased Line?
A leased line is a secure fibreoptic connection between two or more locations. These business telecoms solutions are a direct line that connects your business premises to your internet service provider, but it could theoretically be utilised as a secure high-speed link between any two locations. The speed of internet access, data backups, video calling, and VoIP telecoms are all improved by a leased line.

What Sort Of Business Needs A Leased Line?
While FTTP (Fibre To The Premises) and FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) connections are suitable for the majority of businesses, other are better served by a leased line. Leased lines are best suited to organisations which are heavily reliant on the internet for their day-to-day operations and those who conduct activities which require very high internet speeds (such as continuous data backups).

What Are The Benefits Of A Leased Line?

- Speed
Leased lines are the fastest internet connections on the market. The speeds are normally around the 10Gbps mark. This is ten times faster than the average FTTP connection.

- Ready For Increased Bandwidth Use
Businesses are using more and more bandwidth every day. The rise of cloud services, VoIP, video calls and real time data backups means that this use is set to increase even further in the future. For this reason, you want to future-proof your business by getting the fastest line possible from your telecoms service provider so as not to get left behind.

- Improved Upload/Download Ratio
Most internet lines, whether domestic or business, are focused on having the highest download speeds possible. However, some businesses rely on upload speeds just as much as downloads. VoIP calls, cloud services and data backups all require a large amount of data to be uploaded. Leased lines have a more balanced Up/Down ratio when compared to FTTP or FTTC lines.

- Uncontested

All other broadband lines are shared among other users, at a ratio of anywhere from 50:1 for home broadband and 20:1 for business broadband. A leased line is exclusively for your business and is “uncontested”, meaning it is not shared with any other users. As a result, there is no slow down or throttling of speeds during peak times.

- Low Latency
Due to the lack of contention and high speeds of leased lines, they have far lower latency. Latency is the time delay between signals being sent and received. This is often colloquially referred to as “lag”. Leased line’s lower latency is most noticeable on VoIP and video calls which are seamless, whereas on even on fast FTTP and FTTC lines there is often a noticeable delay.

- Improved Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
The service level agreements on leased lines are often more stringent than regular home or business broadband. The SLA will stipulate maximum downtime and service response times for support requests. In the event of a fault, leased line customers are normally prioritised over other users.

How Can My Business Get A Leased Line?
You can approach an internet service provider directly, but it is worth investigating offers from business telecoms providers first. Business telecoms service companies can often bundle the leased line with other telco services like cloud-hosted VoIP telecoms and business mobiles. The market for telecoms for business is very extensive so it’s always worth doing your own research before settling on your chosen provider.