Why are Leased Lines Beneficial For Businesses?

There are very few businesses – large or small – that are able to operate without any kind of internet access. In this modern age of high-speed connectivity a high speed internet connection is as essential to the smooth running of a business as a telephone line was twenty years ago. But what is a leased line, and why is a leased line so beneficial for business? What is wrong with regular broadband? We at Luminet are the leading fibre-optic broadband provider in London, and a leading leased line provider. We can explain everything.

Put simply, a leased line is a dedicated internet connection. It differs from regular broadband because the line which carries your data is not shared with other users. The benefits offered by a leased line remains one of the best kept secrets of internet provision, something which as a leased line provider ourselves we have a serious interest in changing. At Luminet we are able to offer both a fibre leased line connection which is the more conventional way of doing things – if anything about leased line connectivity can be called conventional – but we are also able to offer a completely wireless leased line service. This revolutionary approach gives users line-of-sight connectivity via microwave antennas. Not only does this mean your business will not have to wait for fibre-optic cabling to be installed, you also have the ability to exercise full control of your bandwidth.

Whether your business chooses to stick with the cables of a fibre leased line or take to our “network in the air” having your own business leased line brings with it a set of benefits that cannot be matched by even the fastest connection made via conventional broadband. The most obvious and easy to explain of these benefits is speed. Think of it like this; the kind of dial-up connection we were all so impressed with back in the nineteen nineties can be compared to the little used single track roads you might find in the Scottish Highlands or the Yorkshire Dales. They will get you where you need to go, but not quickly and any kind of traffic will cause considerable additional delays. Conventional broadband is, in comparison to this, more like a dual carriageway. Significantly faster but still susceptible to congestion at busy times. To continue the analogy fibre broadband is a motorway. Faster still, and less likely to be affected by congestion but might still experience slow downs when traffic levels are very high.

The difference made by adopting a leased line? In this analogy a leased line would be akin to your own private jet that is able to simply fly above all three sets of traffic jams with absolutely nothing to get in the way. Not just fast. Really fast. A leased line has this capability because it is completely dedicated to one user. When Luminet is your leased line provider your connection is exclusively yours.

But there is more to a leased line than simple raw speed. As anyone who follows motor sport will tell you, there is more to going fast than simple straight line speed. A car might have a top speed of two hundred miles per hour on the straights, but if it has to slow down to fifty to go around a corner it will be beaten by a car that can maintain its top speed. This is a less perfect analogy than the single track road to private jet explanation but you get the idea.

And that is what a leased line can do for your business. Conventional broadband is always optimised to provide the highest possible download speeds. This compromises uploading speeds – in effect Broadband is fast, but it has to slow down in the corners. A leased line offers what we call “symmetrical speeds” – equally fast both uploading and downloading data. Not only that, but the base line speed of a leased line is significantly faster than broadband. Conventional broadband, even fibre optic broadband is measured in megabits per second (Mbps). A leased line offers speeds of up to ten Gigabits per second (Gbps). It is literally orders of magnitude faster. To continue the motoring analogy, broadband is a powerful road car. A leased line is Formula One.

The dedicated nature of a leased line connection is also an advantage – it is the reason you never have to worry about congestion. It is your private jet. Nobody else is there so nobody else can get in your way. There are huge security advantages to this too. The absence of third party users on the line means you are much more secure from malicious cyber attacks.

A leased line is also able to offer a significantly more reliable connection than conventional broadband is able to provide. Traditional broadband is much more subject to delays in data transmission than a leased line – a phenomenon known as “latency”. Latency is perhaps best described as the time it takes for your car to go from zero to sixty miles per hour. Broadband accelerates like a forty year old metro while a leased line remains in Formula One. Latency exists on a leased line, but in comparison to broadband it is very low indeed.

Unlike a regular broadband connection, a leased line allows for flexible bandwidth too. While conventional broadband can only offer the bandwidth it has, the bandwidth available on a leased line can be dialed up and down depending on the needs of the business. You might not actually need ten gbps. Perhaps you only need eight. Or four. So why pay for capability you have no current need for? With a leased line you can tailor your bandwidth to your needs. As your business grows and you take on more employees your need for bandwidth will increase and at that point you can dial it up as you need.

As you might expect from such a bespoke service a leased line also offers significantly higher quality. Functions which use a lot of bandwidth, such as video conferencing and high speed data transfer operate much more smoothly over a leased line than they ever will on broadband. You can also be sure that you will always – and we mean always – get the service that you are paying for. If your agreement specifies you get 5Gbps then 5Gbps is what you get. No fluctuations. No slow downs. A completely reliable and predictable service.

And yet, with all of this capability a leased line is completely cost effective. Fibre broadband is fine for the demands of domestic use and businesses with modest internet usage. But for medium and high volume internet users a microwave or fibre leased line of the kind that we, as an experienced leased line provider can offer can revolutionise the way that your business operates. We think that you will find the advantages that our leased lines can give you extremely beneficial.