Tell me about leased lines

SiD the Turtle · 20 Nov 2009 at 13:28

I work for a small business (around 30 people). On our network we get about 4-6MBps which is enough for most things (mainly users using online services) but we could do with better uploads for remote workers. We currently have two consumer broadband lines serving our building and with the line bonding and router leasing, we pay about £200 a month for this.

The main problem we have is reliability with the ISP, so I've been investigating the possibility of leased lines. I guess from the off it's going to be much, much more expensive but is anyone else out there running a similar sized business with a leased line? How are you getting on with it?

droyden · 20 Nov 2009 at 13:39

We have a 10mbit full duplex leased line from telewest, touch wood we havent had any issues with it for a long time. I think we are paying more like 800 a month for it, altho cant be completely sure

iaind · 20 Nov 2009 at 13:43

There's very little point "reviewing" leased lines - as they just work. A 4mb leased line will deliver 4mb of bandwidth all day, every day in both directions.

So it really comes down to cost, which entirely depends on location. Not many places will give you a fixed price, but you can get an instant (rough) quote from www.networkflow.com.

Installation costs can be high but depend on 2 things - the medium and whether you are "on net" for the provider. Copper leased lines (MegaStream) are normally limited to 2mbit, but can be bonded for multiples thereof. Fibre will generally cost more to install but goes up to silly speeds. Fibre is generally presented as ethernet and copper normally as X21 serial. Most providers will give you a managed Cisco router too.

Think carefully about your bandwidth - an 8mb broadband doesnt equate to an 8mb LL, due to the silly "up to" clauses, contention and the assymetric nature of ADSL. We've got about 90 users, several sites, home workers, mobile email and replication of 500gb of data offsite - and that all runs on a 4mb line. We were quite happy on a 2mb line until the replication went in.

We're in a notoriously expensive area for leased lines (devon) but our 4mb line costs about £700 per month but I've just had pricing on 10mb of £748. Thats with NTL who dont charge for installation

bigredshark · 20 Nov 2009 at 14:47

iaind said:
There's very little point "reviewing" leased lines - as they just work. A 4mb leased line will deliver 4mb of bandwidth all day, every day in both directions.

Sometimes, sometimes not. Some providers seem unable to provide the bandwidth promised reliably (I'm looking at you Virgin Media/NTL/Telewest) and it can be hell getting it fixed.

Some providers are better than others unfortunately. The best in my estimation - I've worked for various ISPs for a long time - are Colt (and a few other smaller carriers - Neos for example) and the worst being a tie between NTL/VM/Telewest and Global Crossing (previously fibrenet, who were good until they got bought).

Given you're fairly small I'd look at maybe bonding a couple of E1s (2mbit each) so get you the required bandwidth. Advantage is they tend to be pretty reliable and are cheap for dedicated lines.

Unless you're in London or Manchester or somewhere similarly big, in which case try and get a decent price on 10 over 100 on fibre because there will be plenty providers looking for your business in the current climate and install costs for lower end circuits like that are still reasonable (that is to say, usually less than £10k install)

ruffneck · 20 Nov 2009 at 15:03

we have a 20mb over 100mb LL which equates to about £1200 per month, never had an issue with it. Its fibre based presented as ethernet into a Cisco 1800 series router.

in Norwich, Norfolk
Supplied by Opal

Sin_Chase · 20 Nov 2009 at 20:47

iaind said:
There's very little point "reviewing" leased lines - as they just work. A 4mb leased line will deliver 4mb of bandwidth all day, every day in both directions.

So it really comes down to cost

^ This at the end of the day.

If you are looking at pricing make sure you know whether its a managed or un-managed service as in the latter case you will likely need to supply your own kit after presentation.

pictus · 21 Nov 2009 at 16:58

bigredshark said:
Some providers seem unable to provide the bandwidth promised reliably (I'm looking at you Virgin Media/NTL/Telewest) and it can be hell getting it fixed.

We're currently negotiating getting a couple of fibres from NTL/Telewest - I'd be interested to know if the bandwidth problems have been with the provision of the line/equipment itself or has it been capacity problems at the POP/upstream?

iaind · 21 Nov 2009 at 17:45

Seeing as the lines are capable of hundreds of megabits, it's going to be a capacity issue.

I've always wondered why fibre lines presented as ethernet need a router - our NTL line was provided with a Cisco 1800 router, it's just configured with the first external IP on the first ethernet, the second external IP on the second ethernet (presumably with /32 subnets, I havent seen the full config), so we need to use the third IP out of our 5 for our firewall.... I don't get why we cant just plug our firewall into the terminating unit!

SiD the Turtle · 21 Nov 2009 at 20:22

Cheers for the suggestions guys, I'm going to ring around for a few quotes and see how it compares.

pictus · 21 Nov 2009 at 20:34

If you find the quotes are quite high in your area it might also be worth seeing if you're in an area covered by Easynet's Surestream or Etherstream service.

It's delivered over multiple phone lines rather than fibre but can offer 10-20Mb in both directions if you're not too far from the exchange.

Yamahahahahaha · 21 Nov 2009 at 20:39

iaind said:
I've always wondered why fibre lines presented as ethernet need a router - our NTL line was provided with a Cisco 1800 router, it's just configured with the first external IP on the first ethernet, the second external IP on the second ethernet (presumably with /32 subnets, I havent seen the full config), so we need to use the third IP out of our 5 for our firewall.... I don't get why we cant just plug our firewall into the terminating unit!

They don't.

Kind of strange since the NTL chaps I've dealt with always recommended running 100mbit+ connections straight into a layer 3 switch because of the switching fabric.
Not that an 1800 series would get stressed out by 100mbit at all, but if you upgraded it to 1gbit in the future, you'd have to faf around.

bigredshark · 21 Nov 2009 at 22:14

Yamahahahahaha said:
They don't.

Kind of strange since the NTL chaps I've dealt with always recommended running 100mbit+ connections straight into a layer 3 switch because of the switching fabric.
Not that an 1800 series would get stressed out by 100mbit at all, but if you upgraded it to 1gbit in the future, you'd have to faf around.

Cisco quote around 37Mbps for the 1841, I've tested it and got far less under some circumstances. You'll need a 2821 for reliable throughput of 100Mbps, if you want line speed gigabit the cheapest cisco router is a 7301.

And the reason is that they like to be able to see a device at the far end for management, if your an ISP you don't want to care about what your customer is plugging into the link so if you put your own router in as CPE you can monitor errors on the link easily...I spent years designing solutions for ISPs and the rule is that customers are idiots by and large who don't understand networking terribly well in general, so having your own kit on site and not worrying about how badly they've configured their equipment is a god send.

bigredshark · 21 Nov 2009 at 22:29

pictus said:
We're currently negotiating getting a couple of fibres from NTL/Telewest - I'd be interested to know if the bandwidth problems have been with the provision of the line/equipment itself or has it been capacity problems at the POP/upstream?

It's their network upstream is my strong belief. Nobody at NTL will actually say that officially but it's fairly good supposition. It's usually basically dark fibre to the nearest pop and into their MPLS core from there, dark fibre either works or not, you don't get speed degradation so it's their MPLS network.

I'm bypassing our CPE and using industry standard test gear (smartbits..) to test, it took doing that in front of an NTL engineer before they'd even acknowledge a problem.

The other issue is that their network spans across all their separate legacy networks it seems (NTL, telewest, blueyonder etc) and I get the strong impression that bridging between the two actually involves physically patching between the two in some circumstances.

Generally the problems turned up on higher bandwidth circuits (1Gbit circuit which smartbits rated as around ~350Mbps - after three weeks faffing they finally admitted they didn't have the bandwidth in their network. But I saw a couple of lower bandwidth circuits which were serious trouble, a 6 over 10 link which topped out at 4.5Mbps - that took months to fix.

Overall, my advice is stay a million miles away from NTL, that said I'm currently negotiating a wavelength service with them for one of our datacenters which is a bit off the beaten track and I need somebody who isn't BT so the options are limited.

pictus · 21 Nov 2009 at 22:45

Thanks bigredshark, that's interesting...I have to admit that my concern with NTL is that even though they try to separate their consumer and business services I can't help but wonder if it's just lumped together as one big mess.

We're currently looking at a 50 over 100 so problems on a 6 don't sound too encouraging...

bigredshark · 21 Nov 2009 at 22:51

I should add we had dozens of of 4 or 6 over 10 which worked fine. Problems were the exception rather than the rule on that kind of bandwidth (but that said, BT, Colt, Neos and Global Crossing all provided similar numbers of circuits with no throughput issues). With higher bandwidth (100mbps plus) problems came up almost every other provision.

stoofa · 24 Nov 2009 at 14:56

We have a 20mb leased line here at our head office.
It's a 100mb line in place and we are tiered to 20mb.
Next year we re-negotiate and will probably take 50mb.

Our London office has a 100mb leased line.
This is amazing to use, remote users can really get a lot of work done.

Lines are supplied by Verizon.
They are a "managed" service in that they provide the routers at our end of things.
However they are simply set to allow "anything and everything" through and we firewall with our own choice of products which we have full control of etc.

richard smith · 30 Nov 2009 at 12:20

We have NTL/Virgin at two of our sites. 10Mb over 100Mb. Faultless. The one I am at has had zero down time in 2 years and never experienced any other issues.

dataplumber · 11 Dec 2009 at 13:12

We are in a similar situation to the original poster.
We currently have a 10Mbps ntl business broadband connection but require better upload speeds for remote workers, file uploads and vpn access.
We're currently looking at NTL's managed internet access.
BT also have a 10Mbps for the price of 5Mbps leased line offer at the moment.
Can anyone recommend any other options/providers in the Lincoln area?
Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

bigredshark · 12 Dec 2009 at 11:24

I've given most of my advice before, I've had problems with NTL but they are cheap generally. BT Ive never taken a managed service from, just LES/WES circuit so I couldn't say accurately, I imagine they'll be middle of the road. Neos, Colt, Global Crossing, Verizon are all possibles really - there's no specialists in particular areas outside of London really.