Do we need a leased line?

The company I work for needs a new phone system and its been recommended that we go for a VoIP system which is fine but as part of the deal we are also being recommended to switch to a 50Mbps leased line on 3 year contract which is very expensive compared to our current FTTC 80/20 business service. I should also mention that Openreach have been digging outside our premises recently and apparently one of their guys told a co-worker it was in preparation for FTTP. I've been out of the broadband loop for a while so I was hoping to get some opinions on whether a leased line is overkill or not? I do appreciate the advantages (uncontended, symmetrical, low latency, SLA, etc) but these advantages are expensive! Some pertinent details:

Small business - between 6 to 10 people depending on the season.
Current FTTC speed tests averaging out at around 40-50 Mbps down, 8-12 Mbps up. Average latency around 30ms.
Average small business internet use: email & attachments, web, occasional video calls over Skype etc. Not sure of monthly usage but would guess less than 100GB. If we lose internet for a few hours or even a day it would be frustrating but manageable, it would have only a minimal impact on our business.
We have managed on FTTC and (ADSL previously) for many years without real issue, so main reason for this upgrade is to facilitate a VoIP system.

And questions:
Is leased line overkill for VoIP plus usage described above?
Does 50Mbps leased line mean 50Mbps throughput?
Is there a way to check when FTTP will be available? (I'm not convinced co-worker got facts right).
What is the upload/download of typical FTTP business service?
What is typical install & monthly costs of FTTP business service?
What is typical business contention ratios during the day these days? I know it used to be 20:1 but I believe no longer calculated at the local level in the way it was before.

I'm interested in the FTTP aspect because if FTTP will indeed soon be available then this may be a better fit than leased line for our particular needs.

If you can live without internet for a few hours, and the current service is fine for current usage, then stick with it! No need to pay for a leased line.

Find a VoIP provider that has a decent mobile phone app so you can still take business calls using mobile data if the FTTC goes down. For example, we use RingCentral for calls at my work.

Who is recommending the leased lne?

If you are worried about loss of service, upgrade your current FTTC service to a BT Business service with a 4G back-up so that if the copper line goes down your service will transfer across to the 4G - you may not get teh same bandwidth but will be able to handle urgent business.

The extra cost is very, small.

Put it this way. The office I work in has around 30 people on average in it, we use Cisco for our phone services, Webex and Skype for video conferencing and we only have a 10 Mbps leased line with an ADSL backup.

The backup can cause a bit of a problem because it's only hits 4 Mbps down and and around 1 Mbps up.

In reply to a post by office123:

Is leased line overkill for VoIP plus usage described above?

In your company's situation, yes. One of the main advantages of leased lines are the super quick fault fix times (SLA) - which can be as quick as 2 hrs. So ideal for companies such as online traders who may suffer financial loss in the event of a fault.

In reply to a post by office123:

Does 50Mbps leased line mean 50Mbps throughput?

You would need to check with the supplier. Otherwise if 50 Mbps refers to the connection speed, you'd be looking at ~ 45 Mbps throughput after overheads.

In reply to a post by office123:

What is the upload/download of typical FTTP business service?

Anywhere from 40/10 to 1000/220 Mbps. You can only order 500 Mbps or above on FTTP if your exchange supports these speeds, otherwise you would be limited to 330/50.

In reply to a post by office123:

What is typical install & monthly costs of FTTP business service?

Depends on what you're willing to pay. For £250+ pm you can get 1000/220 Mbps on FTTP (if your exchange supports it) or for less than £50 pm you can get 40/10 on FTTP. In the middle, 330/50 costs anywhere between £50-£150 pm. Install time can vary from few weeks to few months (if service is available to order).

In reply to a post by office123:

What is typical business contention ratios during the day these days? I know it used to be 20:1 but I believe no longer calculated at the local level in the way it was before.

Contention ratios are no longer provided by CPs, however its still a shared service. BT Retail, for example, guarantee a minimum speed of 100 Mbps on their 330/50 FTTP service.

If your company is after a VOIP service, then I would highly recommend yay.com (no i don't work for them lol). They're primarily a business VOIP provider, not the cheapest out there but great for business line features and with top class UK based support.

If you are only a 10 person organisation then your maximum active call traffic is likely to be 800kbps (10x80kbps) plus some signalling overhead - much less than your current broadband and so in itself unlikely t require a leased line.

A leased line is one option, and allows for much more stringent SLAs, both in terms of availability and performance, but at a cost.

Have you looked at e.g. Andrews and Arnold Office::1 product which provides multiple lines for resilience. They also offer VOIP services which will run over that connection (or independently). NB other providers do offer similar services

In reply to a post by office123:

The company I work for needs a new phone system and its been recommended that we go for a VoIP system which is fine but as part of the deal we are also being recommended to switch to a 50Mbps leased line on 3 year contract which is very expensive compared to our current FTTC 80/20 business service. I should also mention that Openreach have been digging outside our premises recently and apparently one of their guys told a co-worker it was in preparation for FTTP. I've been out of the broadband loop for a while so I was hoping to get some opinions on whether a leased line is overkill or not? I do appreciate the advantages (uncontended, symmetrical, low latency, SLA, etc) but these advantages are expensive! Some pertinent details:

By chance, it's not BT Local Business that are telling you you need a new phone system and naturally a leased line is it?

Our phone system, which like yours never goes above 10 users at a time, is all done over FTTC, and works just fine. The line has only ever gone down once, and our 4G backup kicked in straight away and took over until it was restored. It was barely noticeable. We use a Draytek router, all self set up, that automatically flicks over to 4G if the VDSL has a problem. I'd say that unless you're a big call centre, a leased line is not necessary.

In fact, in the same amount of time that we've had this in place, someone I know that uses a leased line for their business has had three outages. The only difference is that he gets a bit of compensation for loss of service.

You should talk to Blizzard Telecoms.
They sell broadband products with better response times for business critical systems.
Also they guarantee call quality if you have their broadband and VoIP.
Its what we use where I work and we have had zero issues.

office123

If you post your postcode or if this is too descriptive of your location your town /city area. Someone may be able to tell you the likelihood of getting FTTP as some areas are having Fibrefirst rollout in areas already covered by FTTC, otherwise this would be quite unusual for your speed FTTC.

The leased line pressure sounds very like a salesman selling a high commission product that you don't really need. As others have said your existing FTTC connection can handle your requirements with ease. Only point of contention is likely to be Skype calls at a busy phone time ( due to upload issues). IF this happens just get a second FTTC connection this would be far cheaper than a leased line.

For leased line comparisons you could always ask for a FTTPoD quote to see what that would cost.

I think we are in a fairly similar situation....

We are a small business with 20 staff, we have recently installed FTTP but we are keeping our VDSL line for backup. They are with different ISPs and go to different exchanges, so short of a bus knocking down our telephone pole we are reasonably safe.

We have been using VOIP internally for years but have always had ISDN lines for external connectivity.

So now we have two reliable internet links we are planning to use the FTTP for our main internet link and route the VOIP traffic over the VDSL line. We can get far more VOIP calls down the VDSL line than we ever need.

The router will be set up to fail over in the case that either line fails.

We built our own Linux PABX and have a POE Ethernet switch to run the VOIP phones. Reliability of internal VOIP has been very good for many years and there is no rental cost.

There is a substantial saving from cancelling the 2 ISDN2e lines and renting a SIP trunk. We are going to use Zen for the SIP trunk, the VDSL line is with them and we have been with them for ~15 years, which says something about their reliability.

In conclusion I think you might find a leased line an expensive luxury.

Hope that is useful.

In reply to a post by MarkLeman:

... so short of a bus knocking down our telephone pole we are reasonably safe.

It happens, or in our case, a car. Then the Local Authority would not allow BT to reinstate the pole without giving 3 months notice - they found a work around hoiwever we were without service for several weeks!

Back in my old office several years ago we used two bonded bad ADSL lines (1.5Mb/s and 2Mb/s I think). That supported five software engineers working as part of a trans-Atlantic software development team just fine. Most of our workload was local but we shared our source code via a corporate repository and often used Remote Desktop to control test machines. We were also connected to their world-wide telephone system over VoIP.

The only time it caused us problems was if it actually failed (which was fairly rare). The bandwidth and latency was fine.

The only things we struggled with were downloading very large files (we worked with MS SQL and Outlook so occasionally had to download very large databases) or trying to connect to SQL servers located in the US.

Edited by Andrue (Tue 02-Jul-19 16:47:46)

In reply to a post by kitcat:

For leased line comparisons you could always ask for a FTTPoD quote to see what that would cost.

Leased lines are dealt with/installed differently to FTTPoD and getting a quote for FTTP will not bear any relation to what a leased line would cost.

It happens, or in our case, a car. Then the Local Authority would not allow BT to reinstate the pole without giving 3 months notice

If our pole was knocked down then we would loose our ISDN lines, VDSL and FTTP, which would be interesting to say the least! An external 4G antenna & modem is on my list to buy at some point, however there are several other disaster recovery priorities ahead of it

We are a small business with 20 staff, we have recently installed FTTP but we are keeping our VDSL line for backup. They are with different ISPs and go to different exchanges, so short of a bus knocking down our telephone pole we are reasonably safe

What makes you think the VDSL2 comes from a different NGA exchange than the FTTP?

What makes you think the VDSL2 comes from a different NGA exchange than the FTTP?

The fibre goes directly to Tunbridge Wells exchange (confirmed by the installation team who had jointed it at 8 points on route) and the copper (voice) goes to Benchley exchange. So they share a duct up the hill then go their separate ways.

Now I could not tell you exactly where the back haul from the VDSL street cabinet goes but I had always assumed it went back to the local exchange (I stand to be corrected). And it is perfectly possible (even likely) that Benchley exchange is fed from Tunbridge Wells. I am sure there will be some common infrastructure involved along the way, but the key thing for us as a small business to that we have a reasonable degree of redundancy without going over board. Mostly separate routes, separate ISPs and different technologies give enough redundancy for the moment.

For us a leased line would expose us to a very similar degree of risk from physical damage that the VDSL or FTTP lines do. Yes they have SLA, but that comes at an increased cost.

A 4G modem and external antenna will be the next level to add... just in case.

We also have to balance the other risks to our business, so for instance power cuts are far more common than phone outages, so in the overall scheme of things investing in UPSs will give me a better return on investment.

Horses for courses

By chance, it's not BT Local Business that are telling you you need a new phone system and naturally a leased line is it?

BT local business routinely try to flog us their latest weeze. Recently having failed to convince me to change ISP to BT and use their VOIP, they tried to convince me that a leased line would be free to install, when I asked why they said it was because we were very close to 'HEYWOOD exchange'. When I informed them that "HEYWOOD exchange (OL10 1LT, Church St, Heywood) is 322.90Km away from our office as the crow fly's" they refused to believe me This particular email exchange descended in to farce. A short while later we received a follow up call from an independent company doing quality checking on the service, I sent over the complete email chain, they could not believe how poor the sales person had behaved and they were incredibly apologetic.

This was just the latest example of them attempting to miss sell to us, to the point where we refused to talk to them ever again.

Most smaller exchanges only do copper based services.

Any VDSL2 cabinets on these exchanges have the fibre come from larger fibre exchanges (called NGA or Head-end exchanges).
The fibre doesn't go to the smaller copper exchange first but comes directly from the NGA exchange.

The fibre from the VDSL2 cabinet almost always comes from the same exchange as any FTTP in that area.

I was simply confused by the comment that the VDSL2 and FTTP came from different exchanges, as that's pretty rare (though it can happen).

The VDSL2 (and so your internet) would continue to work even if the copper exchange suddenly blew up.

Both your VDSL2 and FTTP would stop working if the NGA exchange blew up.

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

Most smaller exchanges only do copper based services.

Any VDSL2 cabinets on these exchanges have the fibre come from larger fibre exchanges (called NGA or Head-end exchanges).
The fibre doesn't go to the smaller copper exchange first but comes directly from the NGA exchange.

The fibre from the VDSL2 cabinet almost always comes from the same exchange as any FTTP in that area.

I was simply confused by the comment that the VDSL2 and FTTP came from different exchanges, as that's pretty rare (though it can happen).

The VDSL2 (and so your internet) would continue to work even if the copper exchange suddenly blew up.

Both your VDSL2 and FTTP would stop working if the NGA exchange blew up.

I can�t think of a reason why FTTP (as we know it today) would come from the small exchange in this example. It would come from the handover exchange as the infrastructure just isn�t there to terminate it at the small exchange, by design.

Of course, a leased line fibre would go to the local exchange, different tech and different network architecture. But even that would be simply connecting onto a link fibre cable between the small exchange and big exchange.

In reply to a post by MarkLeman:

By chance, it's not BT Local Business that are telling you you need a new phone system and naturally a leased line is it?

BT local business routinely try to flog us their latest weeze.

I have refused to deal with them. They are, as far as I know, just "franchises" trying to sell as much as possible. I have had the same type of issues with them trying to sell me inappropriate products and teh moment I get a call it becomes "goodbye".

Back in 2017 the numpties at BT Local Business tried to sell me FTTP On Demand at less than wholesale cost. They quoted me £150 /m with zero installation costs on a 24 month term. Thinking this was too good to be true, I queried this with their Sales Manager, who was totally adamant i would get FTTPoD installed on those t&c's. I even had a signed contract with those terms (signed by both parties). Unsurprisingly, a few weeks later they reneged on the contract and cancelled my order. I've no idea if I could have taken action against them for breach of contract but TBH I didn't want anything to do with them again.

BT Business Infinity Ultra 330/30 (FTTPoD)

It probably would have not got installed, however,had it been me, I would have at least sent a composite to the BT CEO.