Are you finding it difficult to get a quick online price for a leased line?

Leased lines are dedicated connections just for your business and the cost depends on several variables that are specific to your business location and needs. So, although you’ll need to share some information with us before we can give you a leased line price, below we have detailed what is involved in calculating a fibre leased line quotation.

Overview: Factors affecting a leased line’s price

• Distance to nearest fibre node
• Excess construction required
• Length of contract
• Fibre bearer size
• Bandwidth required
• Will you connect to the internet?
• Service and support

One-off costs

Installation and construction charges:

This is the cost of the actual physical engineering task to get the fibre cable to your premises. The cost will vary depending on whether there is existing fibre infrastructure already in the vicinity and how far you are from the nearest fibre node.  In simple terms, connecting a building located just 50m away from available infrastructure should cost less than connecting a building 2km away from the fibre node.

We can give you a budgetary cost of how much an Ethernet fibre connection will cost to put in, worked out from the distance from the nearest node, but once you have decided to go ahead with a service, we can arrange a site survey with Openreach to determine the exact leased line pricing.  These construction charges do not usually apply once the premise has been “fibre enabled” or served with fibre, as the major engineering work to get fibre tubing into the building has been done previously.  However, if there is a requirement for a different entry point into the building, charges may be raised once more.

The good news is that at the present time Openreach will contribute a flat amount of £2,800 towards the cost of each new leased line installation.  With available fibre infrastructure becoming more widespread, if you’ve previously been concerned about installation costs, they may now be lower than you think and, with the Openreach contribution, they might even be free.

Also, it is worth noting that for an Internet Service Provider there are costs involved in setting up a fibre connection, as each connection is a project in its own right. This is why if you opt for a leased line contract that is less than three years a one-off connection charge will also be added, as well as any Excess Construction Charges (ECC), to make up the total cost of installation.

Monthly costs

Bearer rental

The first factor that contributes to the ongoing monthly cost is the fibre optic bearer rental which varies depending on the size you require. The bearer is essentially the peak capacity of the fibre optic cable and associated network terminating equipment that is dedicated to your business. The bigger the bandwidth capability of the bearer, the higher the cost, but this will be driven by your business needs.

Understanding how you intend to use your fibre now and in the next few years will dictate the recommended size of the bearer you have installed. With the fast pace of increased technology usage within businesses, some choose to install a larger bearer than required at that moment, to allow your ISP to increase the bandwidth of your fibre remotely without any additional physical engineering. A 100Mbps connection delivered over a 1Gbps bearer will have a higher monthly rental than a 100Mbps connection delivered over a 100Mbps bearer.

Bandwidth

This is the maximum speed of the connection you require. This can be up to the capacity of the bearer, e.g. you can have up to a 100Mbps connection over a 100Mbps bearer. The speed you choose will depend upon your usage, what applications you need to run, how data-heavy these are and how many people will be using it at the same time. As you would expect, the higher the speed, the higher the price. To make sure that you do not under or overestimate your requirements and lose out financially, the team at Beaming are skilled at capacity planning and in selecting the right bearer and bandwidth for the needs of each business.

Other factors affecting the leased line price

Connection to the internet

An important factor that contributes to your total leased line fibre price is the connection to the public internet. Unless the fibre is connecting two sites or your premises to a data centre, it will need to break out to the wider world. It is the design, equipment and capacity of the ISPs core network that will affect the performance of your leased line when using it. You want to make sure you are paying for a provider that interconnects with multiple internet exchanges, can ensure less congestion, fewer points of failure and has enough capacity so that performance will not falter, whilst having appropriate security measures in place to protect the network

Customer service

Although thankfully, faults are a rare event for fibre leased line, if there was an incident where your fibre goes down, you need to make sure your provider is able to meet your expectations.  If you choose a company which resells connectivity, rather than being a true ISP, there could be a delay in reporting and fixing faults due to the multiple suppliers involved so it is always worth checking that your provider will not only be able to meet the contractual service level agreements in place but also be proactive in dealing with faults and good at keeping you updated.

More frequent fibre leased line questions answered

• Why do fibre prices vary?
• How do I switch to a new leased line provider?
• What happens during a site survey?
• What’s the difference between point to point and internet fibre?