Does my business need a leased line ?

To find out if your business needs an internet leased line, otherwise known as fibre optic leased line or ethernet leased line, you’ll need to consider a series of questions, which we’ve outlined below.

What is a fibre leased line?

It’s no secret that data can be transmitted at much greater speed through fibre optic cable than through copper. With a leased line, the fibre optic cable is just for your business; a private, un-contended connection completely free of other bandwidth-hogging traffic like TV streaming and online gaming.

How many employees do you have?

If there are only two people working in your office at the moment, you might not need a leased line just yet. The more people you have working simultaneously, the more un-contended bandwidth you’ll need to ensure that no one’s ability to use the internet for their vital tasks suffers. As your business expands, it’s easy to increase the bandwidth of a leased line. Nothing gives us more pleasure than seeing our customers’ businesses grow to the point that they request this.

Is an internet connection vital to your business?

It’s worth asking yourself what your employees would be doing if the internet went down for an hour in your office. If the answer is making a lot of cups of tea and competing in wheely-chair races then yes, we can confirm that internet connectivity is vital to your business. With British businesses suffering three days of internet downtime each on average during 2016, the cost of lost productivity and extra overtime to the UK economy was £7 billion. A leased line is less likely to fail than traditional broadband products, since it’s made from fibre optic cable which is not prone to interference. It will also benefit from higher-grade hardware and and should come with a SLA of around 5 hours to fix in case of a fault. The agreed speed is the speed you’ll get, 24/7.

How much data do you send?

Sending data is not just firing off emails. Think of any process you run that involves requesting information or sending it over the internet. This could be VOIP calls, cloud back-ups or file sharing. All of these are affected by upload speed. You may have noticed that traditional broadband products have a significantly slower upload speed than the download speed. With a leased line, both these speeds are the same. This is known as symmetry.

Do you have multiple office sites?

If yes, and you find that collaboration and file sharing between the two or more sites can prove tricky due to slow internet speeds, a leased line connection would resolve that problem. Furthermore, if members of staff work remotely, either at home or at clients’ premises, you’ll find that a leased line is speedy and safe for this purpose.

Does your business use VOIP or cloud hosted voice technology (or would you like it to)?

Early adopters of VOIP products have been known to report problems with the equipment not working the way it should be. Generally, the problem is not the equipment itself but the internet connection being used. A leased line can handle multiple staff members making simultaneous calls, all whilst other colleagues search the internet, send emails or connect remotely to the office. With the right infrastructure in place, VOIP can be the perfect cost-effective solution for businesses relying on telephony on a daily basis.

Have you, or do you plan to migrate to cloud computing?

For a business to store data and run applications over the internet, it will need a reliable, fast connection. In an office that does not rely on cloud computing, internet use may be more sporadic; one staff member may be using the internet whilst another is offline. With cloud computing, everyone needs to be online all the time and a connection that’s not up to the job will be put under increased pressure, with a resulting slow down in speeds. Furthermore, even a short 10 second-1 minute drop in internet uptime will become much more noticeable. If you need to run a backup at 5pm before your office closes, can you put up with this being slowed down by traffic from other businesses doing the same thing? If not, an un-contended line may be necessary.