What is the right Bandwidth for my Leased Line?

There are many factors to consider before purchasing a leased line for your business, the most important one being “do I really need one?“

Assuming you do, where do you begin? Perhaps, the second most important thing to decide is the amount of bandwidth you need for your leased line.

What is Bandwidth?

Think of bandwidth as the maximum amount of data that can be transferred over a connection, in this case, a dedicated internet/network connection.

There are 1000 megabits in 1 gigabit. The average fast internet connection to a person’s home in the UK is 50-60 megabits per second. Even 12 megabits per second is enough for the majority of home browsing, although with the prevalence of streaming services, higher speeds are necessary for a pleasureable viewing experience.

Think about what your business does: do you have a lot of employees all using and all needing at least 40 Mbps each? Or do you run a serviced office company and need to provide 100 Mbps per room? You, or your IT team, will have to sit down and work out how much bandwidth you need to distribute or use. If you have a 1 Gbps connection but 10 employees are using it to read their emails, a speed test would show close to 1 Gbps. However, if you had a thousand employees all checking their emails at the same time, you may have no bandwidth left, with each employee having perhaps just 1 megabit left for themselves.

Of course, your company’s employees would never all be using the internet in the same way all at once, so you have to give it a bit of thought.

Luckily, there are such things known as bearers. The bearer allows you to have access to a maximum bandwidth, say 1 Gbps, but you could choose to start with 100 Mbps bandwidth. You could start by paying very little for a low bandwidth, but if you have underestimated how much you need, upgrading your bandwidth can be done automatically and very quickly, with no new installations neeeded.

Another important consideration to make is regarding the price of hardware. With Ballscoigne’s leased line offerings, we provide managed solutions up to 1 Gbps bandwidth, meaning you get a router set up and configured to work with your leased line circuit. Of course, you can buy and set up your own hardware if you know how.

When you go for very large bandwidth connections, such as 10 Gbps, the price of hardware that can actually utilise the full 10 Gbps of bandwidth becomes very, very expensive. Lots of hardware benchmarked at 10 Gbps will only do, say, 5 Gbps. That said, most businesses will never need anything above 1 Gbps.

Are you planning on switching to a leased line? Why not give us a call, or you can send us an email. We can walk you through every step of the way, so you feel comfortable in your excellent investment.