Leased Line Connectivity: What is it?

If your organisation needs connectivity to support business critical data and applications, it’s important to find a solution that works for you, and a leased line connection is often part of that. Leased lines provide connections between networks that require data to ease communication. This could mean they connect offices to the Internet, or to other geographically distant offices and sites, or they might even carry telephony data such as a call centre.

Fibre Ethernet Explainer Video

In short:

A leased line is a dedicated, uncontended, symmetric, resilient data connection often used by businesses or distributed organisations.

Since that contains a lot of technical jargon, let’s run through those terms individually:

Leased Line Features

Dedicated

This means your leased line connection is solely used for your data.

This is important for two reasons. Firstly it’s better for data security as your data doesn’t travel on public routes. But it also means other users don’t affect the quality of your connection.

Uncontended

Contention ratio is the maximum potential demand at any one time, over the actual available bandwidth.

Often with shared Internet connections such as home broadband there are peaks and troughs in terms of bandwidth. You may notice in the evenings that Internet seems ‘slower’. The higher the ratio, the more likely that your connection will be affected and ‘slowed down’ at peak times.

A dedicated leased line will have a 1:1 contention ratio. This means that the provider can guarantee a fixed speed or bandwidth, regardless of the time of day.

Symmetric

This means the downloads speeds are the same as the upload speeds. This is useful for a number of common activities such as:

• Online Backups
• Desktop as a Service
• Video Conferencing
• IP Telephony
• Uploading large files

Additionally, leased line connections usually come at higher bandwidths than ordinary connections with up to 10Gbps capacity available.

Resilient

Resilience means that the connection doesn’t go wrong, and if it does, it has the ability the quickly recover. Most leased line connections have around 99.99% uptime. That’s about 60 seconds of downtime a week.

If your organisation is dependent on connection to the outside world, then it is vulnerable if this connection is lost. Having a connection with resilience mitigates this and provides business continuity.

A resilient leased line solution will ensure there is no single point of failure. This can be done by incorporating secondary lines to increase diversity, which means using multiple providers, fibre routes, and entry points. If connectivity is at the forefront of your operations, then a diverse leased line solution provides much better protection against interruptions or outages.

Leased Line Benefits

Save Time & Money

An improved connection provides an excellent return on investment, and enables organisations to take full advantage of cost-saving cloud services. Additionally the increased resilience of leased line connections means that the impact of costly downtime is mitigated.

Improve Productivity

Work smarter, not harder. Every organisation is somewhere on the way to being on the cloud, if not already fully cloud based. Cloud based software and collaboration services improves the way people work, and link them more effectively to sites or customers located in other sites or even across the globe.

Security & Continuity

Enjoy peace of mind with secure private virtual cloud. Mitigate both cost challenges and migration risks with flexibility and ensure business critical functions stay online around the clock with high availability backed by SLAs.

How do you get one?

Serviceteam IT have enterprise solutions for organisations of any size. We offer scalability and flexibility that would otherwise be unavailable from legacy services, and deliver dedicated, secure, uncontended fibre connections for all your voice and data traffic. What Serviceteam IT offer is:

• Extensibility – Our infrastructure can grow, adapt and scale to your business
• Continuity – Network designed with contingency options for business continuity
• Cost Savings – Do away with expensive hardware, switching, and set-up costs
• Fully managed – Eliminate admin and billing headaches
• Proactively monitored SLA – with up to 99.999% uptime
• Maintainence – Hardware maintenance included in standard service
• 24/7 Support – From a dedicated fault management team