6 Tips to help with your leased line comparison
Leased Line prices can range from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand & it can be a daunting task ensuring your company gets the best deal possible. All our customers want to know how they can get the best leased line prices & who can help them get the best leased line comparison. So, we thought we would write about it & let every business we can reach learn how to save on their leased line costs. So sit back, enjoy the read & watch the savings come rolling in!
What impacts Leased Line Prices?
There’s a number of things that impact the cost of a leased line but the 3 main ones are your location, the upload speeds & download speed of the fibre leased line& the length of the contract. Other factors that can alter your leased line quote are which suppliers lines are being used, what other services you have, what your scope to grow is & the providers margins/business plan.
Naturally much of these are out of your hands so what can you do to help get the best results from your leased line comparison?
- Compare Leased Line connection costs – Not with the cowboys who are providers posing as comparison sites! Use a reputable comparison who genuinely compare the market & give you the option to sign your leased line service contracts with a range of leased line providers. Leased Line Comparison have been doing it for years & we learnt from the best so would highly recommend using one of us to help.
- Find out the speed you need first – Knowing the speed you need before running a leased line comparison is so important – some of you may already know exactly what you need. But, if you don’t know what internet speed your business needs I found a decent article from Business.org who are over in America. If you scroll about half way down the page it has a table which is handy to give you an idea of the speeds likely to be needed.
- Don’t just go to BT business – BT leased line cost is often one of the most expensive on the market. Why? Honestly, no idea because they are BT & they can would be my guess. They own a huge amount of the fibre & you can often get cheaper leased line prices by going with a provider who re-sell BT rather than direct with BT themselves.
- Compare the carriers – When you get your leased line installed, the underlying circuit will always be from a wholesale provider. This tends to be BT, Virgin, Talk Talk, Colt & SSE – But the leased line prices from each carrier can be totally different. For Example – Virgin could be selling you a leased line using BT as the carrier network. Its important to know who you are “on-net” for & the best way is comparing all the carriers.
- Consider Other Services – Most leased line providers will also sell other telecoms services like VoIP phones, data back up, business cloud services & SD wan to name a few. For small businesses you may not have a lot of other services you can group in & get a discount on but if you have multiple sites its a great way to really drive down your leased line prices. However, this works better with providers who are hungry to gain new business so the better known providers probably won’t do much more than get you a free router.
- Consider offering to pay for installation – I know this one sounds crazy – why offer to pay more?! But there is method in the madness. Most providers when taking out a standard 36 month contract will give you free install but they absorb the cost into your monthly payments so if you can pay for the installation then you would save monthly for the lifetime of the contract.
How much does a leased line cost?
Leased Line prices can start as low as £150 per month for a 30mb leased line, around £195 for 100Mb leased line on 100Mb bearer & £495 for 1Gb leased line on 1Gb bearer. Does this mean you can get them prices? Possibly – major cities get more competitive by the day & fibre optic rental charges are always getting lower too.
However, when buying a leased line package there are some key differences you will find between broadband and leased lines. Many providers will also sell Ethernet first mile (EFM) connections as leased lines but they are not quite as good. As most of you will know your broadband connection will go down at peak times & also depends how close you are to the exchange as to what speeds you will be able to get.
With an internet leased line it uses fibre optic cable & the line is a dedicated internet connection to you. It doesn’t matter if you get a leased line when you have a small size business as the line can grow with you & you can request bandwidth increases if your company does grow.