Looking at getting a leased line...

Mort

Mort

Mort

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18 Oct 2002
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Location
Milton Keynes
Hey all

I work out in the sticks and as I work for a web agency its long been a problem of having a terrible net connection. We have looked into leased lines in the past and wasnt really viable cost wise on our own. Anyways a bunch of other businesses in ours and neighbouring courtyards are having similar issues, and we are looking to pool our resources to get a 20mb line.

The owner of the land has been quizzing me on it, and although I think I would know how to go about it, wanted to ask about here to see other peoples opinions on it all.

I think the setup would be 4 or 5 main businesses using it, with maybe same again using very little bandwidth etc just to make up the costs.

Was thinking one main box with some kind of traffic shaping on it (smoothwall or similar?), switch, and a ton of cat6.

Wondering if anyone has any good sites / resources of information, suitable specs for the main central machine, and what kind of switch would be good for such a task, as doubt your average home use netgear would cut it :p Obviously as above budget is an issue.

Thoughts?
 
I saw some projects in similar rural areas where they ran fibre optics themselves, so they have tonnes of spare bandwidth for the future - the cost of running a lot of additional bandwidth is minimal as you're only a few extra cm of cable when it comes to fibre.

I'll see if I can dig them up and link them
 
The main problem is that you're "out in the sticks".
We had a leased line installed a few years ago.
Although NTL were in our area they didn't offer any business class services.
So it was good old BT (via our ISP) that did the physical installation.

It cost us around £15k to have the lines installed and took 6 months to complete as things needed digging up etc.

We've now got a 100mb connection in - we're currently tiered down to 20mb (due to pricing and contract) but come February next year we should be negotiating the connection to 50mb.
 
like stoofa said installation may be a mission if you are out of the way.

How much budget do you think the entire project will have?
 
Your best bet would be to contact a VNO type ISP who will then look at all the possible providors in the area. Its most likely going to be BT, VirginMedia(NTL Business) or maybe someone like NEOS. You want a WES100 100Mb ethernet connection that will be capped to 20Mb but you still have plenty of growth room.
By far the biggest cost will be the installation. To get fibre its priced on distance from the nearest suitable fibre connection point. They then have to dig to your site which with all the legal/council requirements can be 6 to 8 months.
Have a chat with the landlord to see if he will pay towards the cost as it will be a good selling point for him.
 
jamoor said:
how much do these things run monthly?
Click to expand...

That will vary depending on contract length, sla level taken, any sort of managed hardware / support for this, location also can have an effect and also ultimately the provider used.

In say central London I know you can find people offering 100mbit circuits for under £1k a month now, out in the sticks you may find as you're having to stick to some of the bigger service providers the costs associated with them are rather a bit higher.
 
In general leased lines are a order of magnitude better than xDSL or similar for reliability and you'll always get the speed you bought... but it does depend on the provider, some can be fairly shocking at times, find someone good and get a couple of customer references from them (decent providers shouldn't mind being asked).
 
bigredshark said:
There's more to go wrong, it's essentially being obsoleted as 21CN goes live and it's obviously much slower (and bonding just doesn't work reliably or consistently).
Click to expand...

And given that the OP says they are out in the sticks I doubt they actually have the options of SDSL.
 
As someone above said - the advantage of a leased line is that you're on a 1:1 ratio.
So none of this "50 people sharing a 1mb connection" - the 20mb connection is all yours.
It's also 20mb/20mb - sync connection, as fast up as it is down.

Cost will again be higher for "out in the sticks".
Our London office has a 100mb leased line and we pay less for that each month than we currently do for our 20mb connection "out in the sticks".

As for ISP's - we are using Verizon here for our "out of sticks" connection.
Not the cheapest, but for reliability etc they have been excellent.
Can't remember who we're using for our London connection.
 
stoofa said:
As someone above said - the advantage of a leased line is that you're on a 1:1 ratio.
So none of this "50 people sharing a 1mb connection" - the 20mb connection is all yours.
It's also 20mb/20mb - sync connection, as fast up as it is down.

Cost will again be higher for "out in the sticks".
Our London office has a 100mb leased line and we pay less for that each month than we currently do for our 20mb connection "out in the sticks".

As for ISP's - we are using Verizon here for our "out of sticks" connection.
Not the cheapest, but for reliability etc they have been excellent.
Can't remember who we're using for our London connection.
Click to expand...

That's not leased line unique though, nothing to stop you getting 1:1 SDSL, most business ISPs should offer it really...
 
If your sharing with other businesses there are other considerations to do with the connections that will need to be thought about... fiber or wireless links locally would reduce many of these problems - running direct wired connections would have potential issues with common grounding (or lack of), surge and lightning protection, etc. theres a few both technical and legal/liability considerations... even tho the possibilities seem remote it would be silly to ignore them.
 
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