Does a leased line use a "normal" landline?

Our house used to be divided between two tenants, each with their own landline. Now we're here we've combined the property again and are using one of the landlines for phone and broadband, while the other is still connected up (has a dial tone) though we don't pay line rental on it or anything.

Could we use the additional landline as a dedicated internet-only line (for an increased speed over ADSL2+)? Is this what a leased line is?

Thanks in advance for any answers!

Leased lines are usually a dedicated fibre or multiple copper pairs to a property

A guide price can be found via http://clueless.aa.net.uk/etherquote.cgi

No reason why you could not use it, but you will still need to pay line rental on it.

In reply to a post by tjbp:

Our house used to be divided between two tenants, each with their own landline. Now we're here we've combined the property again and are using one of the landlines for phone and broadband, while the other is still connected up (has a dial tone) though we don't pay line rental on it or anything.

Could we use the additional landline as a dedicated internet-only line (for an increased speed over ADSL2+)? Is this what a leased line is?

Thanks in advance for any answers!

To reply to your question simply, the 2nd line is still a Landline & if you wish to use it for Broadband you will need to pay Line Rental (as well as any Broadband Charges), whether you use phone facilities or not.

Whether that could be converted to a Leased-Line, I'm not certain about - but I would expect that you might be concerned over the potential cost (suggest you refer to Mr Saffy's post & associated link).

Let me rephrase my question; is there anything faster than ADSL2+ I could use a separate landline for? I'm aware I'd need to pay line rental and any other associated costs. Thanks!

Yes, Fibre providing your exchange and local cabinet has it.

What exchange?

Do you know the no. of the unused line? If not, try dialling 1470 17070 and it might tell you.

To see if you can get Fibre, FTTC or FTTP, try both nos. in BT BROADBAND AVAILABILITY CHECKER.

In reply to a post by tjbp:

Our house used to be divided between two tenants, each with their own landline. Now we're here we've combined the property again and are using one of the landlines for phone and broadband, while the other is still connected up (has a dial tone) though we don't pay line rental on it or anything.

Could we use the additional landline as a dedicated internet-only line (for an increased speed over ADSL2+)? Is this what a leased line is?

Thanks in advance for any answers!

To answer your question; Leased lines can run over either Copper or Fibre.

What determines it (usually) is whether the copper line has the capability of running the leased line service at the quality and speed at which the customer is ordering. For instance you won't be able to get a leased line service on a 10km copper line.

Fibre is usually used more as far as I know because it is much more future proofed and because it is much more reliable (Less joints to the exchange). It is also capable of much higher speeds than that of copper especially over long distances.

Also Fibre doesn't suffer from crosstalk.

Obviously as you are probably aware leased lines are extremely expensive and the setup fees can be enormous if you don't end up using existing infrastructure.

In reply to a post by tjbp:

Let me rephrase my question; is there anything faster than ADSL2+ I could use a separate landline for? I'm aware I'd need to pay line rental and any other associated costs. Thanks!

Can I further rephrase your question to what I think that you may be asking:-

"If I use a Telephone Landline exclusively for Broadband, is there a version/type/grade of Broadband that will additionally use the Audio Frequency Bands (normally allocated for telephones) that will increase the overall capacity/speed"?

If I've now understood you correctly, then the simple answer is NO!

Assuming you can't get FTTC or FTTP there, (a link has been suggested for checking, but here it is again - use the phone number you are using live), then you could activate the second line to get line bonding or load balancing/sharing.

Google them.

Also have a look at this AAISP page re their line bonding. ISPs don't come much better than them, but unless you fit into their price structure become very expensive.

If you see anything about the ISP Be and line bonding I would be very wary. They've just been bought by Sky and no-one knows what will happen re their line bonding.

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 12-Jul-13 17:53:25)

Not likely!

https://www.dslchecker.bt.com/sdsl/sdslchecker.welcome SDSL does use the audio frequencies, but isn't faster downstream and does cost a bomb.

If line bonding, do the used lines retain separate phone numbers?

No idea. All I know is plenty of people on these forums use it to get faster downloads.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

If line bonding, do the used lines retain separate phone numbers?

yes, because the voice services are distinct and only the broadband is bonding. There may be one IP address or more, depending what type of bonding is in use.

bonding does not affect the telephone numbers assigned to the line

In reply to a post by camieabz:

If line bonding, do the used lines retain separate phone numbers?

As others have said broadband has no connection with telephony beyond a shared cable. So yes, you'll have two separate phone numbers. If you go that route you should bear that in mind when reporting a fault

We used to have a dual bonded line solution at work. It did a good job overall turning two poor 54db lines into a single 5Mb/1.2Mb connection. The only thing I would say is that sometimes if one of the lines was having a bad day it destabilised the entire connection. That wasn't always the case though and might have been down to our Cisco router. Another factor is that you might find you need a box that you have no idea how to configure.

Overall I'd say our office connection was a good decision but it's a lot better now that we have a fibre-based leased line

Did you measure the Attenuation after the bonding, to allow comparison with the 54 db?

Or in lieu, the speeds before bonding?

Distance?

The 54db was determined in the early days before the Cisco box was attached using a domestic modem/router - we didn't know enough about the Cisco box to know what it thought

Performance-wise one line was running at about 3.5Mb/s, the other was worse at around 2Mb/s. Distance-wise it's just under 5km. The route is entirely underground but the last half is rural.

Interesting in that it looks almost a simple aggregation of the two lines, as opposed to some more complex arithmetic, eg a Root 2 (1.414) improvement above the simple aggregation, ie around 7 Mbps.

On the other hand, 5 Mbps looks of the right order for 5 km.

In reply to a post by eckiedoo:

Did you measure the Attenuation after the bonding, to allow comparison with the 54 db?

bonding at the TCP/IP level doesn't affect attenuation or at the DSL level.

In reply to a post by eckiedoo:

Interesting in that it looks almost a simple aggregation of the two lines, as opposed to some more complex arithmetic, eg a Root 2 (1.414) improvement above the simple aggregation, ie around 7 Mbps.

On the other hand, 5 Mbps looks of the right order for 5 km.

Yeah. We have a third line that's kept as a backup and it's rather ironic that the downstream throughput on that was roughly the same as the old connection. Better sometimes. It could never match the upstream throughput of the bonded lines though and for us that was very important. We work as part of a trans-Atlantic software development team so we push almost as much data to the US as we pull.

The two bonded lines were both pretty poor considering. Just luck of the draw I suppose but we never could get BT to do anything about it apart from when one went seriously bad. Otherwise it was the usual story from BT :-/

What we have now (for whatever it's worth) is a 100Mb fibre bearer to our little office park. That's then distributed around four companies. I think we all took a symmetrical 10Mb/s service in the end. Costs were £3k each for install and £220 pcm rental. Cheaper than we'd thought but it took a [censored] long time to get it installed. Organising all four companies was like herding cats and then we got caught up in Openreach's current woes so it took nearly five months instead of three months to go live.

Edited by Andrue (Sun 14-Jul-13 10:08:15)