If you're getting a quote for a leased line: I'd say 100M should be plenty for a normal small office. Some providers will sell you 100M on a 1G bearer, which means you can burst up to 1G on demand. Typically your usage is metered in 5 minute buckets, and if you use more than 100M for more than 5% or 10% of the buckets in a given month, there's an excess charge to pay. If you expect your continuous usage to be over 200M then you're likely better off paying for 1G unmetered.

Sound advice I'll keep that in mind when talking to Telco's / getting quotes. thank you

You may as well get quotes for various bandwidths, right up to the full bearer bandwidth. There’s not terribly much ££ per month between some of the higher splits.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

If you're getting a quote for a leased line: I'd say 100M should be plenty for a normal small office. Some providers will sell you 100M on a 1G bearer, which means you can burst up to 1G on demand. Typically your usage is metered in 5 minute buckets, and if you use more than 100M for more than 5% or 10% of the buckets in a given month, there's an excess charge to pay. If you expect your continuous usage to be over 200M then you're likely better off paying for 1G unmetered.

That is not how leased lines work.
If you get a 100Mb on a 1Gb bearer, it means you're paying to get 100Mb bandwidth on a connection that can deliver up to 1Gb if you upgrade in the future.
The connection to the NTE is 1Gb but you are limited to 100Mb.

Thanks
Dan

In reply to a post by fidoedidoe:

Sound advice I'll keep that in mind when talking to Telco's / getting quotes. thank you

Will put my 2p in the meter - We have an SSE (Neos) Leased Line on a 1GB bearer, it uses Openreach fibre to connect to the SSE POP in the local exchange to us.

You're in the fortunate position that since fibre has been pulled the way to you anyway, you're likely not to face an ECC's like we got put towards us when we first decided to try Vodafone for a leasedline.
As others have mentioned, it's rural areas like ours that get hit with the large cost of laying fibre as they have to dig up roads / ducts to get to us!

Upload is the real advantage of a leased-line, having the ability to upload 500mbs symmetrically has been bliss for our business purposes!

There are so many possible solutions in communications tech these days that you have to be careful stating what is or isn't correct. It very often isn't as clear cut as you think.

Some leased lines can have burst speeds up to the bearer rate such as this from Aquiss....

Aquiss Leased Line

That looks like a 200Mbps service with 1Gbps burst speed to me.

In reply to a post by danielhyde:

If you get a 100Mb on a 1Gb bearer, it means you're paying to get 100Mb bandwidth on a connection that can deliver up to 1Gb if you upgrade in the future.

Not necessarily. The provider *may* hard-limit you to 100M, but often do not.

The amount of bandwidth you're guaranteed - and pay for whether you use it or not - is normally referred to as the Committed Data Rate (CDR). However you may be allowed to burst above it, and are generally charged if you do so for an extended period, normally measured at the 90th or 95th percentile.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In reply to a post by danielhyde:

If you get a 100Mb on a 1Gb bearer, it means you're paying to get 100Mb bandwidth on a connection that can deliver up to 1Gb if you upgrade in the future.

Not necessarily. The provider *may* hard-limit you to 100M, but often do not.

The amount of bandwidth you're guaranteed - and pay for whether you use it or not - is normally referred to as the Committed Data Rate (CDR). However you may be allowed to burst above it, and are generally charged if you do so for an extended period, normally measured at the 90th or 95th percentile.

I have hundreds of leased lines installed for clients with a lot of different providers and they all have a hard limit

Thanks
Dan

The only people I'd seen offering burstable until that Aquiss link were Colt. I would imagine that being able to burst requires you to be on-net with your chosen provider, because if they take a tail from BTw or TalkTalk then they are going to have to pay for the capacity regardless of whether it's being used.

In recent years the cost differences between 200Mbps and 1Gbps have become so small than I'm not sure having burstable capacity or percentile billing when we're talking about simple internet connections to a business provides that much value - it's definitely not something I'd go in search of.

Where it does seem to have value is if you're using something like Giganet on CityFibre as the prices end up putting it somewhere between a business broadband connection and a leased line.