Brief Guide to Leased Lines
But what is a leased line and how can it benefit a business? Here is a quick guide to help clear up a few things and give you the right tools to work out whether a leased line is right for your company.
Leased lines are digital and thus always active. In addition, a business will not have to share a leased line with any other customer of the ISP, since it is an uncontested connection. With no additional traffic to worry about, a leased line can offer a guaranteed amount of bandwidth to a business with no peaks or troughs caused by external factors.
Leased lines also operate on a symmetric basis, which means that download and upload speeds are identical to one another. This is in contrast to the asymmetric nature of a typical business broadband service, which usually shapes traffic and download data rates, making in-house hosting problematic.
Leased lines are an alternative to standard broadband services and are specifically designed for enterprise usage. This means they do come at a premium price point with annual contracts usually required as a minimum commitment.
However, the various benefits of a leased line help to easily justify its expense and give businesses powerful performance that might otherwise be unattainable.
Basically, you can work out how much bandwidth your business requires upfront and then receive an appropriately priced tariff from the ISP. Then, if you need to increase your bandwidth further down the line, this will be an option.
The point here is that you will only need to pay for the bandwidth you require and as your needs grow it is simple to unlock more of your leased line's potential. Modern services, particularly those operating between two locations, can deliver network speeds of up to 1Gbps, which should be enough to cater to most tasks.
As well as guaranteed bandwidth, a business using a leased line can also receive guarantees that relate to the connection's expected uptime. Many firms need uninterrupted network access and this is not always available via a standard landline connection, but a leased line will be much more resilient.
On top of all this the security levels offered by leased lines are higher than most other comparable services, because businesses will not be as vulnerable to outside attacks thanks to the private nature of this connection.
This is particularly applicable to companies that lease lines to connect two or more locations to one another, since you are basically creating a closed circuit that can only be accessed by someone who is physically present.
All of the benefits of leased lines make them appealing to a wide variety of businesses, although of course they are not necessarily appropriate for every firm. Be sure to work out precisely what usage you will require before you commit to a leased line package.