Don’t let your Internet access slow you down!

Connectivity to the Internet is to some extent taken for granted. Internet access is of course firmly established as the primary, and usually the only, communication link for business premises. Internet access now underpins email, virtual meetings, phone systems, remote working, web portals and other activities that are at the core of modern business activity.

Fast and reliable Internet access should therefore be the first item considered when evaluating new premises or planning for business growth.

Broadband links are widely available and cost-effective but they have a number of disadvantages.

Broadband has no service level agreement (SLA) or guaranteed fix time should a fault occur. Leased lines have a financially backed SLA with a maximum fix time. This offers a leased line customer the reassurance that a fault will be fixed quickly, but it also means the underlying network technology providing the links is more resilient and reliable because the incentive is on the supplier to deliver a reliable service.

No guarantee of speeds is provided on broadband links and the attainable broadband speed also varies depending on the physical location of the premises. Leased lines guarantee that all of the bandwidth of the chosen service will be available to the customer at all times. The SLA for the service will include clauses around latency to ensure that any degradation of the service is rectified promptly.

Broadband links are contended, meaning that the available bandwidth of the connection is shared with other users in the local area or others using the same provider. Because a leased line is a dedicated link provided to the customer premises they do not suffer from contention.

Leased lines offer symmetric bandwidth, meaning the same level of upload and download bandwidth is available. Sending data to the Internet (uploading) is often as important to a business as a receiving data from the Internet (downloading). Broadband links often have very low upload speeds that hamper productivity and hamper communication and collaboration.

Deployment of a leased line is achieved by running a dedicated fibre optic cable to the customer premises from the local point of presence, generally located in the closest telephone exchange. At the premises, this fibre cable is connected to termination device, which is connected to the ISP router, which is in turn connected to a firewall.

The bearer of a leased line circuit indicates the maximum available throughput. 1000Mbps (Megabits per second) bearers are now deployed as standard, with 200Mbps bandwidth having the most attractive pricing. These circuits can be upgraded to provide up to 1000Mbps quickly and remotely if required. The bearer can be thought of as a pipe, and the bandwidth represents how much the tap is turned on to fill that pipe.

Leased lines generally have a longer minimum contract term than broadband circuits but the upside of this is that the one-off deployment costs for them are generally zero. Leased lines can have a much longer leadtime from ordering to go-live so it is important that businesses plan ahead to deploy a leased line before they are needed.

Albacore deploy leased lines and supply and support firewalls and wireless and wired network infrastructure to ensure company devices can utilise that connectivity effectively.

Contact us today for a no obligation on-site evaluation and consultation so that you can take the next step with your business connectivity.