50 - 100 mbit leased line options

Hi all,

Really not sure whether to put this under Which ISP residential or business forums, so thought I'd ask a general question here to gauge whether my requirements are actually feasible!

I live in an FTTC enabled area, but the line length means I'm getting 40mbit down, 6mbit up at best. I'm not in a Virgin Media zone and they have no plans to expand to my area (source: response to their 'cable-my-street' enquiry mailbox).

So, I'm wondering what other options I have for getting a solid, reliable connection between 50-100mbit (I suppose the speed comes down to cost mostly) on both download AND upload, to my home.

Why? Well, I'm lucky enough to be able to work from home a decent amount, but for this to be practical in the long term I really need a fast, stable connection - neither of which are satisfied by Sky or Plusnet FTTC at this time.

Do I have any options? Can the likes of Spitfire, for example, provide an ethernet connection to a home? Would any of this even be feasibly priced for a technically non-business use? I have a preconception that a 100mbit leased line is probably not going to sit in the £500 - £1000/month bracket !

Various business leased line companies exist. BT, TalkTalk, Virgin and others. You need to speak to the business arms of their operations. It's going to depend on how far you are from the local POP for the company and also install costs could be high depending on what infrastructure is already there (this has no relation to FTTC).

Companies do this every day and if you are willing to pay then they can almost certainly deliver.

For 100Mb with onward Internet connectivity I am guessing you might be looking at between £5K and £10K per annum. Install costs could be significant. We had a quote for 100Mb link (without Internet, this is internal business line) for £3K install and £2.3K annual rental. That was from a company who are a business specialist and is much cheaper than we would have had using BT leased lines.

Ian,

Thanks for your comments. I'll make a start on gathering up some contact details and working out an exact budget of what I can / can't afford, and start making some quote calls I guess!

Would just house number + postcode be sufficient for quotation purposes? I imagine a site visit by engineer would be required to properly assess install costs, but annual rental / bandwidth costs should be straight forward enough I guess?

I would think address would be enough. Could need a site visit but I think they generally do costings on paper (ie maps) rather than physical visits.

Do a google for "leased line internet" and you should get lots of results.

Long and short, if you are close to the POP (the endpoint for a leased line - not necessarily your local exchange), you are looking at probably around £300-400/month, but don't be surprised if it is a lot more than this. I've had customers in one town varying from around £400 for 10 on 100 to over £700 for the same speed, and they have a local POP.

You will also find that the standard install may be covered FOC if you sign for a 36 month contract, but if there are any excess construction requirements (cabling, ducting, etc), these can rapidly add costs. Another example (although the higher end) - a customer required 2.4km of cabling & ducting to bring a leased line to their premises. The end quote was for £98,000 ex VAT.

Have you looked at/considered EFM as another alternative? It will only do a max of 20Mbit each way if you take 4-pair, but it's generally more cost effective than a Leased Line.

RobC.

Depending on your usage, perhaps AAISP can bond two or more FTTC lines to aggregate the speed.. Not so good if you need 50mbit up but it might be good?

any help ?

http://www.gigaclear.com/home-use/

Since you are connected to a fibre enabled cabinet, are you in an area where you might get FTTPoD ?

Gigaclear would only be interested if they are already in your area doing a rural BB project.
They install their own network totally separate from BT's
.....and they are not interested in places which already have access to a SFBB type service via BT FTTC cabinets or Virgin anyway.
See their criterion http://www.gigaclear.com/can-i-get-it/

Yeah I read that afterward, shame, I'd pay their prices for 100/100 or 200/200 , could stretch to 1000/1000 but only for bragging rights

/me chuckles at TheBaronragger.

Fixed your nick for you .

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 18-May-14 14:26:22)

One of our quotes a while back for a 2Mb leased line was £360K install. We installed about 600 connnections and this was the most expensive quote (we didn't go ahead with it).

Hi Andy,

As others have mentioned there's no doubt that you could get a leased line into your home. That said...

Leased line providers typically don't see home addresses as attractive to dig to. There's only 1 niche customer and they can't leverage more services from other Companies in the building.

There could be significant ECC or extra construction charges.

Additionally credit checking is much more stringent as leased lines are on longer term contracts and the provider is often looking to recoup up front costs.

Someone mentioned bonded FTTC and this may be a good option for you to explore.

Hope this helps, Rob.

In reply to a post by andyfoo:

Why? Well, I'm lucky enough to be able to work from home a decent amount, but for this to be practical in the long term I really need a fast, stable connection - neither of which are satisfied by Sky or Plusnet FTTC at this time.

Just curious - what would you need that kind of bandwidth for? Could you not just remote into a machine at your office and work that way instead? That's what I've always done when working remotely and that way almost anything will suffice - even an analogue modem at a pinch

An added advantage is that you don't have to lug a machine to and from home/office (with the attendant security issues of doing that) and no need to keep multiple machines in sync. Just remote into your normal workstation and pick up where you left off the day before.

Edited by Andrue (Mon 19-May-14 14:26:21)

Hey all, thanks for all the comments and suggestions! I suspect EFM or bonded ADSL may well be about the best option, until FTTPoD rolls around into this area (I assume timings for this are all up in the air, and the best I can do is keep looking out for the exchange upgrade announcements from BT / check the BT availability tracker every now and then)

Hi Andrue, I can do a reasonable chunk of work through terminal services, but I'm usually required to source required software and ISO's myself and upload them into work environments initially. Usually at the start of a project, we need a bunch of Windows and SQL ISO's throwing into a datastore somewhere, which I can either try and do from home (maxing the upload on my VDSL2 line does start to lag out other things though) - or head into the nearest office (50 miles away ) and bung it all through the corporate network - although there are times when corporate and project environments aren't linked, and the only alternative then is to physically visit the datacentre (200 miles away ..) and move stuff around that way.

nb in non-work activities, if I had a decent chunk of bandwidth, I could skip hosting some things on VPS servers and instead run them off my own server(s) at home - I'm not clear on this but I think that is generally frowned on with a consumer-grade connection if not outright banned by some ISP's, so a business-grade internet at home would probably make life a lot easier for work and non-work stuff

Edited by deleted (Mon 19-May-14 14:30:17)

In reply to a post by andyfoo:

but I'm usually required to source required software and ISO's myself and upload them into work environments initially.

Ah, yeah that can be a pain. If you can download the ISOs as a file you could use a virtual CD driver to mount them. We used to do that where we could but of course some suppliers insist on physical media

Mind you at my last office we had the opposite problem and one occasion I drove home (10 miles) in order to download an ISO then burn it to DVD and take it back into the office. It was still faster than waiting for it to download at the office