Leased Lines vs. bonded DSL

Hello, first of all this is my first post on this forum however I got quite a lot of very helpful information from here in the past.

My company is operating in travel business and the at the moment we really struggle to meet our guests internet demands. We upgraded our connections to bonded DSL to gain more bandwidth however it is still not enough.

As fibre is not available in the areas of our estate at the moment, we are looking into installing Leased Lines.

Our current supplier was unable to provide us with impartial info if it is going to take major improvement on the speed( they just want to sale more...). Since there is a massive hike in pricing costs I need to understand if it is going to improve speed of connection.
Selling points like SLA are great but in the past we did not have downtime issues so it is hard to justify the costs.

Any input or experience in difference of speed between bonded DSL and Leased Lines greatly appreciated.

Picking speeds as example

Several DSL lines bonded to give 20 Mbps versus a 20 Mbps leased line.

It is entirely possible the DSL line might give 20 Mbps as often as a leased line BUT AND ITS BIG

With the DSL bonding you may be fighting for bandwidth at the local exchange, the backhaul and in the ISPs own network. So when the going is good you have no problems, this situation might last for years.

With the leased line you usually buy an assured rate, so if you bought 20 Mbps assured/committed you would be guaranteed that ALL THE TIME and have capacity dedicated to you into and maybe even out of the ISP network to the Internet.

Add that to quicker repair times if it goes wrong and you can see the advantage.

With leased lines particularly fibre delivered ones it is easy to increase the speed or sell a 20 Mbps guarantee but you have a access to 100 Mbps (or faster) if no one else is using it.

It is all about certainty and avoiding the loss of business if things do turn bad.

If unsure consider hedging your bets and take a cheaper leased line with option for more speed later and bond this with the DSL to give you a boost and also by nature of different delivery may give you better resilience. For example the DSL might be killed if a electrically noise set of road works was taking place outside the building, but a fibre connection would not blink.

From my experience speed of bonded DSL is fluctuating around 30% percent from usual 'offered' on the line. Additionally you need to consider that three bonded DSL lines each profiled around 8 Mbit/s are not going to give 24 but something around 20-21 Mbit/s - again I am speaking from experience with our current ISP if not less. Annoyingly there is the fault with ' routers going out of sync' where sometimes one of the lines due to errors stops working - so all in all it is not really great product. But our priority is supplying as high as possible bandwidth (within budget...) so we could divide it between our guests. At the moment it is going to cost us 3 times more to get leased line with equal speed .. I am convinced that is is going to be better but can I justify costs?

Justification is only something you can answer.

Does the business lose money when the current performance is downgraded?
A leased line should have its performance criteria spelt out, including compensation for downtime.

20 Mbps does not go very far if you have 20 or more people sharing a connection these days, and usage is only going to grow. That needs to be considered, and how easy you can upgrade capacity, some leased lines allow you to upgrade for short periods of time, e.g. major event

As you already have bonded DSL and want to keep costs down it would be better to consider how the bandwidth you have is better managed until FTTC is available.

So what is the full story? You say travel business, what is that? A hotel, caravan park or what?

What do your users/customers actually need to be able to do?

You may find that having a cache, restricting heavy bandwidth sites and blocking p2p will protect the majority of your users/customer from the odd heavy user that brings the network to a stand still. This will give a 'better' experience to the average user.

Have you thought about using a hotspot service to charge for access. You could provide a free service with only up-to 1Mbps and a paid for service with up-to 10Mbps. This could even be used to provide funds to help cover upgrades and/or a leased line. Although that really depends on how many users/customers you have.

Have you considered hosting your servers in a data centre rather than on your own site?

Few valid points in this topic raised. Thanks guys,

It is 40 self containing villlas. We have fibre infrastructure on site from central location to few cabinets and the copper on the last step. Since it is quite high spec guests expectation are high as well.
Traffic is limited to 4-5 Mbps down/ 0,5 Up per user, addtionally we block p2p, porn etc.
However few users streaming bbc iplayer can seriously effected network.
Charging is not an option at the moment - however if new service will prove to be effective we might use additional bandwidth to sale premium Wifi access.

40 Villas would demand a lot as that could be 160+ people using the one connection.

Is user "per villa" or per connected "Wi-Fi user"?

Allowing users access to 4~5Mbps allows iPlayer to try and stream in HD, which will just eat more bandwidth than 'needed'. It could help if iPlayer/Akamai/Limelight/etc were limited to 2Mbps per LAN IP. This would force iPlayer to stream in SD, most users wouldn't notice and it should reduce buffering issues.

Is TV/Sky provided? It may be helpful to try and persuade users to just watch live TV with something on the 'welcome' card that explains the limitations of shared bandwidth and suggests watching TV on the TV...

Are there any businesses bordering the holiday park. If so could they benefit from sharing some of the install cost and rental of a leased line? You could get a leased line and build a mini B4RN connecting adjoining businesses or even homes. Just another way to spread the cost.

Have you looked at Wireless Leased Line options? Are there any WiMax/Fixed Wireless providers in the area? For example Orbital.net.

What servers?

In reply to a post by hurricane123:

Any input or experience in difference of speed between bonded DSL and Leased Lines greatly appreciated.

Bonded DSL is the act of bonding DSL connections to achieve a single fast connection as you probably know. It's cheaper than a leased line but not nearly as flexible. Depending on your router it can be quite reliable.

A leased line is one of if not the most flexible connections you can have. It can be scaled from as low as 10Mbps (Maybe even lower) up to speeds such as 10Gbps. Only problem with a leased line is it's very expensive.

Leased Line connections also (usually) run over Fibre, have a symmetric service speed and also have a guaranteed speed with no contention. Basically you order 100Mbps, you get 100Mbps both up and down 24/7. Oh and you can have one anywhere if you can cough up the installation fee.

Many leased line connections also come with DSL backup options & reliability guarantee just in-case of failure.

If you want a connection which can be as fast as you want then order a leased line if you have the budget.

If you want a connection which is cheaper than a leased line continue with bonded DSL.

As far as experience is concerned: all leased line connections I've used in the past have been spot on with the exception of my university one which was 1Gbps shared between over 25,000 people including around 3000 on-campus rooms...

Bonded DSL I've had mixed feelings and experiences about - Downloading can be hit and miss due to the multiple connections having their own contention & they are not usually as powerful.

I guess the best thing to say - You get what you pay for

Edit: You will also find with a leased line you can reliably set up your own QOS on your network and guarantee certain speeds to customers because the speed coming on-site will be constant 24/7.

Edited by chris6273 (Fri 05-Sep-14 20:25:35)