Looking for guaranteed performance? Maybe you need a leased line

As broadband gets ever faster and more reliable, you’ve probably heard a lot recently about how full fibre can provide the ultimate business connection.

And let’s be clear about this – for many businesses it can.

With mind-boggling speeds of up to 900Mbps and reliability beyond that of traditional copper-based connections, full fibre really is a great choice for many businesses.

But what if you need more? What if ‘great’ isn’t good enough?

Sometimes you really do need those cast-iron guarantees, and that’s why you shouldn’t rule out a leased line.

But what makes leased line connections so good for businesses? Let’s take a look.

All yours

Unlike your average broadband connection, a leased line is all yours. In other words, your connection from office to exchange is yours and yours alone. That means you’re not sharing with other businesses in your office block, street or business park. Instead, you’ve got your own dedicated line which means you’ll always get the bandwidth you paid for even at the busiest times.

This is sometimes referred to as a 1:1 contention ratio, which simply means that you’re the only user(s) on the line. This is in contrast to standard broadband connections which are often shared between multiple customers.

Symmetrical bandwidth

This has nothing to do with pretty patterns, but the speed of your uploads and downloads.

Most broadband connections are asymmetrical, which simply means that the download and upload speeds provided are not the same. Typical broadband connections provide much faster download than upload speeds. With a symmetrical connection, however, download and upload speeds will be the same, and thankfully this isn’t achieved by throttling download speeds but by providing much faster upload speeds than are typically available. (We should add that some symmetrical full fibre connections are also available).

For most people, especially home users, asymmetrical broadband works perfectly well. After all, most internet consumption is very download oriented. Just look at all those Netflix streams, game downloads and browsing sessions. For many users, occasional or small file backups are the only uploading they’ll do.

But what about when you’re constantly sharing files, regularly backing up large amounts of data or reliant on smooth video calling? When uploads are just as important as downloads it’s great to know you can have the same high performance in both directions.

Guaranteed performance and resilience

And speaking of performance, it’s also very comforting for many businesses to know that leased lines provide guaranteed performance.

For many, these guarantees are more important than the speed of the connection. That’s why leased lines are available in a variety of speeds to suit your business requirements.

A 99.9% availability SLA (Service Level Agreement) as standard means you can be confident that your connection will be there when you need it. And that 99.9% availability guarantee can be boosted even further when taken with additional resilience options.

When downtime just isn’t an option and when ‘highly unlikely to fail’ isn’t enough, the guarantees provided by leased lines can be very important.

Your leased line connection will also be accompanied by 24-hour dedicated support, which means in the very rare event that there is a problem, you’ll be back up and running again as quickly as possible.

Do I need a leased line?

If you’re working from a single office with multiple staff, you rely on uploads as much as downloads, you’re regularly accessing files and services in the cloud, you frequently communicate via video calling or VoIP services or you host data that is accessed from outside your organisation, you may benefit from leased line connectivity.

If absolute service guarantees aren’t essential, your workforce is spread out (working from home, for example), or symmetrical connectivity isn’t important, then a full fibre connection may be sufficient.

If you think your business might benefit from the dedicated, guaranteed connectivity that only leased lines can bring, you can find out more here.