Is a leased line cost-effective?

If you’re thinking about upgrading your business connectivity to a fibre leased line, you’ll have noticed that the monthly cost of fibre is a step up from what you’re paying for a broadband connection. Although the installation may be free of charge or at least more affordable than you think,

Will the benefits of leased line connectivity justify the cost? Could a leased line perhaps save you money in the longer term?

In many cases, the answer is yes, because leased line connectivity can help you make savings in various areas including:

• Productivity
• The costs of cyber crime
• Use of VoIP
• Overall IT resources

Let’s look more closely at some of the ways in which the cost of a fibre leased line may be well worth it for your business.

Fewer outages

Internet downtime costs businesses money.

With so much of our work based online today, an internet outage can mean you’re paying employees for a day spent unable to work effectively. Not only that, but each hour that passes without connectivity may be an hour without new sales, or perhaps without the ability to help existing customers. This may be acceptable as a true one-off, but you and your customers will lose patience with repeated occurrences.

With that in mind, a connection with guaranteed uptime becomes an appealing prospect. Due to its design as a dedicated connection for your business only, a leased line is extremely unlikely to drop out or fail. In the unlikely event of a failure, the fibre leased line comes with a high priority SLA; a 5-hour fix time in most cases.

Increased productivity

When you upgrade from broadband to a leased line, you’ll notice a big boost to the speed of your systems. Even with many employees working at the same time, you’ll be able to send data to and from cloud applications with ease, send and receive large files and take part in video conference calls without noticing a dip in quality.

When we helped the Kurt J Lesker Company upgrade their connection to a fibre optic leased line, they boosted their speeds by 500 times, which adds up to hundreds of hours a year of time and frustration saved by their team.

Security

With a combination of time spent offline, reputational damage to repair, lost work and assets and fines associated with data exposure, the damage caused by cyber attacks against UK businesses in 2019 amounted to almost £13 billion.

Although it’s impossible to be 100% immune to cyber attacks and data leaks, you’re more secure with a fibre leased line. Being a dedicated connection, only your business’s data travels along your own leased line, and in the case of a point-to-point line, there’s no break out to the internet.

(Some) Free phone calls

If you connect two or more sites with a leased line, making calls from site to site is free of charge, since they don’t go via the public telephone network. Replacing traditional ISDN phone lines (and the line rentals associated with them) with VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) technology can lead to big savings, too. This is again particularly useful for multi-site organisations, which can centralise their telephony.

The BeamRing cloud phone system requires capital expenditure, no expensive on-site maintenance and allows colleagues to call each other free of charge.

Sharing resources

A fibre leased line connecting multiple sites can easily handle the sharing of file and email servers across those sites. This results in a saving as there’s no need to purchase multiple resources and it also simplifies matters for IT staff, freeing up their time and resources.

Scalability

If, in two years’ time, your business has grown and needs to increase its 100Mbps connection to 1Gbps, this can be done quickly and without the need to invest in yet further infrastructure. A fibre leased line, once installed, should be enough to carry your business through whatever developments lay ahead.

Learn more: How much should I spend on business broadband?