Full fibre broadband (FTTP) has changed the conversation about business connectivity. Speeds that once needed a leased line are now available on broadband, at a fraction of the price. So why does anyone still pay for a leased line?
Because speed is only part of the story. The real differences are what happens at the busiest time of day, how fast you can send data out, and what happens when it breaks.
What you are actually paying for
Dedicated, not shared. Broadband shares capacity with other users. A leased line, which we call direct internet access, is yours alone, so the speed you buy is the speed you get at 9am on a Monday and 3pm on a Friday.
The same speed both ways. Most broadband is asymmetric: fast to download, much slower to upload. A leased line is symmetric. That matters when you are sending large files, backing up to the cloud, running video calls all day or hosting anything your customers connect to.
A contracted fix time. Broadband faults are repaired on a best-effort basis. A leased line comes with a service level agreement and a guaranteed fix time, so you know how long you could be without it.
Room to grow. A leased line’s bandwidth can usually be increased without changing the connection, from tens of megabits up to 10 Gbps.
Signs you have outgrown broadband
Everything is in the cloud. Microsoft 365, your accounts package, your CRM and your phones all depend on the internet connection. When it slows down, so does everyone.
Calls break up at busy times. Voice and video are sensitive to congestion. If quality drops when the office is full, contention is a likely cause.
Uploads take forever. Sending drawings, video or backups off site ties up the connection for everyone else.
An outage would stop the business. If nobody can work without the internet, best-effort repair is a gamble.
Doing the sums
The most useful number is what an hour without internet costs you. A simple way to estimate it:
People affected × their hourly cost × the hours you could be down, plus any sales or service you cannot deliver in that time.
Compare that with the monthly difference between broadband and a leased line. For many businesses with ten or more people dependent on cloud systems, one long outage a year costs more than the difference. For a small office that can work from mobiles for a morning, full fibre with a mobile data backup is often the right answer.
There is no single right choice, and anyone who tells you there is probably sells only one of them.
Why our own network matters
We run our own business-only core network, and our own engineers install and support every connection. When something goes wrong, you are talking to the people who can fix it, not a reseller passing on a ticket.
If you want a straight answer on which connection suits your business, see our direct internet access and full fibre broadband services, read our guide to the types of business connection, or talk to us on 01642 661888.