Leased line provider recommendations?

jameshurrell · 24 Apr 2014 at 21:34

Looking for recommendations for leased line connectivity. New business located in Letchworth (SMLH) on an industrial estate with no NGA (FTTC/FTTP) availability, poor ADSL and no VM cable. We require simple internet access, I'm guessing over EFM copper or dedicated fibre (but there is no fibre tail in the building so I know there would be extra costs here), for around 15 users currently, but could expand, using offsite hosted Exchange.

I don't have any prior experience in this field and I'm looking to gather a set of quotes to see what's out there. Does anyone have any first hand experience of providers, both good and bad? Anything I should look out for or avoid?

(Not sure if this should go in the Servers and Enterprise Solutions forum...)

Caged · 24 Apr 2014 at 21:40

Try Fusion, they seem to be dirt cheap.

jameshurrell · 24 Apr 2014 at 21:47

Yes, I was just looking at them (found your post from Jan!). Thanks.

Did your demanding moon on a stick clients go with anything in the end?

Caged · 24 Apr 2014 at 21:49

Nah I don't deal with them any more, pointed all the enquiries towards their director and as far as I know they are still hammering a 10Mbit ADSL service and complaining about things being slow.

As far as leased lines go, I think it's tough to get a crap provider since they are all SLA backed. The client list seems pretty reputable anyway, can always contact one of them before making your decision.

jameshurrell · 24 Apr 2014 at 22:01

Ah.... This client is currently in a temporary garden office on a reasonable residential VM cable connection... but they seem willing to pay for a leased line - they are going to have to though as ADSL estimates for neighbouring business at the new location come in around 4Mbps.

Thanks for the suggestion. Will get some quotes.

Caged · 24 Apr 2014 at 22:12

Would a VM business-grade connection not do them? What are they hosting in a shed that needs that sort of SLA?

jameshurrell · 24 Apr 2014 at 22:26

They are moving out of the garden shed that is piggy backing off the home VM connection into an office building they have purchased - it's in a different town to the shed. Nothing special - 15 users on hosted Exchange, fair bit of video conferencing via Skype/Lync and most of them seem to stream radio/TV non stop. It's not so much the SLA (but that would be a bonus) rather the speed (upload in particular) they require.

Caged · 24 Apr 2014 at 22:37

Ah fair enough. Same position my guys were in then.

branddaly · 25 Apr 2014 at 16:47

Also take a look at Zen (disclaimer I do work there). Reason being is that one of our Pop sites is Letchworth, so that should lead to cheaper quotes, and the possibility that we would install EFM kit there if its suitable for you.

jameshurrell · 25 Apr 2014 at 17:08

Thanks Branddaly -I have requested a quote from Zen - they were on my list!

Also looking at Fusion (very quick quote received this morning), Fluidata, Gradwell and A&A.

nutcase · 27 Apr 2014 at 07:38

We've got fibres through VM and Vodafone (who bought cable & wireless) and EFMs through BT and TalkTalk (was quite surprised to find out that talktalk have a larger EFM coverage than BT?!).

We were rather nervous about using a TT connection because their residential side didn't have the best reputation - but they were the only ones to turn up on time (well, the BTO installer who did it for them) even including BT Supplied lines. We have had one outage in Hamilton, but that turned out to be an area wide issue.

As has been said above, they have SLAs to stick to. One thing to bear in mind - EFMs usually have a lower SLA to Fibre.

GefGz · 27 Apr 2014 at 11:11

nutcase_1uk said:
One thing to bear in mind - EFMs usually have a lower SLA to Fibre.

I've been bitten on the todger in work due to this our EFM line through BT only has something like a 90%+ SLA uptime, whereas our fibre VM line has 99%+

So when the EFM went down for 3 hours on a monday morning we couldn't claim yadda.

stoofa · 27 Apr 2014 at 16:00

We used Daisy at my previous place of work.
They are a pretty unknown (by name) company - but own oh so much infrastructure (they bought all the old Pipex fibre for example).
As long as you're somewhere where they can supply the infrastructure then prices are very competitive - less so when they have to get BT/Virgin/Talk Talk to put the fibre in.
We were on a very well priced 1GB barer tiered to 200mb.

nutcase · 27 Apr 2014 at 19:45

GefGz said:
I've been bitten on the todger in work due to this our EFM line through BT only has something like a 90%+ SLA uptime, whereas our fibre VM line has 99%+

So when the EFM went down for 3 hours on a monday morning we couldn't claim yadda.

Do you not have a backup connection? Our main office has fibre with EFM backup; our DR/secondary site has fibre with ADSL backup and all the others have EFM and ADSL backup. All sites have a 99.99% uptime guarantee. It's the time to fix that differs for fibre vs EFM.

Bear in mind as well any refund for downtime is likely to be minimal compared to the real cost to the company.