Dedicated Leased Lines for Business

By: John Shepler

Leased lines have been around since the telegraph was invented. Today, they’re a bit faster. Typical leased lines for business range from 1.5 Mbps on the low end to 10 Gbps and even 100 Gbps on the high end. Let’s look at what leased lines are and how they differ from your typical broadband connection.

Leased From Whom?
You know how it works when you lease a property. You sign a lease document and typically pay monthly for the duration of the lease. For that, you have exclusive use of the office or other building space. It’s similar with leased lines.

The simplest leased line is a pair of twisted copper wires that connect to a demarcation point in your facility to your service provider or through the local incumbent telephone company. For historical reasons, the ILECs, as they are called, own all the copper telco lines. After industry deregulation, other competitive service providers were able to lease these line and then sublease them to you.

The telco may provide the entire line service or just the “last mile” connection to your place. In any case, that’s invisible to you. You’ll get one bill from your service provider that covers the entire line service regardless of how far it stretches.


Dedicated Leased Lines
Leased lines can provide telephone services, Internet access or Wide Area Network (WAN) connections. A single copper pair gives you landline phone service. A multi-pair bundle gives you multiple phone lines. Once you order more than a few lines, it is more cost effective to install a single digital line that supports up to 23 simultaneous calls. That service is called ISDN PRI.

Regardless of the number of lines you need, they are all what is called dedicated lines. That means they are for your use exclusively. Many decades ago, there weren’t enough phone lines to go around and they were shared in an arrangement called a “party line.” The real party often involved snooping on your neighbor’s phone conversations.

Party lines are pretty much relegated to history, although many Internet services have a similar connectivity. You and others in your area share the broadband bandwidth. Typically, you can’t see what your neighbor is doing, but you can feel the effects of the line speeding up and slowing down with the varying traffic. These are shared services versus dedicated.

Dedicated Leased Data Lines
More business activity is now done with computers than telephones. Every business needs some type of digital connection for credit card transactions, Web sites, online order processing, purchasing and inventory, accounting, customer service and so on. You’ll need leased lines for interconnecting your various business locations and for connecting to the Internet

The T1 leased line was popular for decades. It was the first high speed dedicated digital connection available for business and runs at a blazing 1.5 Mbps. That’s pretty slow by today's standards, but it still useful for smaller operations. An advantage of T1 is that it runs on ordinary phone lines and can be installed virtually everywhere.

The next step up traditionally has been to the DS3 or T3 line at 45 Mbps. Above that is SONET fiber optic service at 155 Mbps and above.

These legacy dedicated lines are still in service, but are rapidly being replaced by Carrier Ethernet that better matches the needs of today’s networks. Ethernet over Copper handles the low end from about 1 to 20 Mbps. Ethernet over Fiber is far more capable and is available from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps in most locations and 100 Gbps in some areas.

Dedicated Internet Connections
The Internet itself is a shared resource, which is its great advantage. You can connect with just about everyone, everywhere. It’s your connection to the Internet where you have a choice. You can use a dedicated Internet connection or a shared bandwidth connection.

How to choose? The shared bandwidth connections are what you find in cable broadband, cellular broadband, and satellite broadband services. Consumers and many small businesses opt for this arrangement as it offers the lowest costs.

In addition to sharing the bandwidth on a providers circuit, which causes variations in performance, shared services are also typically asymmetrical. That means the download speed is many times the upload speed. That’s good for watching video streaming or reading web pages, but not so good for sharing or backing up large files, or some business processes in the cloud.

Dedicated lines are usually symmetrical with upload and download speeds identical. They also have rock solid bandwidth that is strictly for your use. If the line is getting congested, then you need to increase your bandwidth because it's all your traffic. A further advantage of many dedicated lines is that they come with a Service Level Agreement that guarantees a level of availability and time to repair, should anything go wrong.

Do you need new WAN bandwidth services or help deciding the best options for your business? Check out the myriad of dedicated and shared bandwidth services available for your particular location.

Internet Service Without The Outages

The Internet is an amazing place for finding out just about anything related to anything. The sum total of human knowledge is migrating online. Even old books and papers are being scanned and loaded onto webpages and data bases. Combine that with real-time access to shopping, financial services, music and video and you are pretty much attached to the Internet at the hip... or at least the brain. The one major aggravation of Internet everything is when you just can’t get to it.

Internet outages are almost always local events now. The network is so large and so robust that the entire Internet just doesn’t go down. It only seems that way. Perhaps it’s your favorite site or application that is temporarily offline. Perhaps you just can’t get to anything at all.

I’ve felt this pain to varying degrees over the years. As a night owl, I know that the wee hours are the time that network administrators target to do their maintenance. That means my ISP can go offline for an hour or two without warning. It also means that any given online service my be down for maintenance with little or no notice.

Then there are the unplanned and uncontrolled outages. Construction work is famous for taking down telecom services. It’s so prevalent it has a name. They call it “backhoe fade.” It’s pretty much what it sounds like. Someone with a backhoe digs in the wrong place and chops through a wire. A year or two ago, they chopped through a fiber optic cable. There were over 100 strands in that cable and my service was on one of the last to be fused back together. No Internet for two days.

Well, not exactly. The cable modem was dead for two days. I was getting things done at any restaurant where they had free WiFi that wasn’t affected. Inconvenient? Yes, but it got me through.

I’m tied to the Internet for my livelihood, but a local outage isn’t the kiss of death. It’s just a major inconvenience. The reason for this is that all of my hosting, dozens of domains worth, is done elsewhere. In fact, I insist on having multiple hosting services located in different data centers in different cities. That way a local disaster won’t take everything down at once. This happened about 8 years back. Remember the 4 hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004? One of them flooded the building my web host was in. Even though they were on a higher floor, the communications lines were affected so no data was going in or out.

This hints at the first thing you can do to protect your business from Internet outages. Don’t put all of your eggs or servers in one basket. You have more protection when the services you use are divvied out geographically. Disasters rarely affect more than a limited area. This is true for cloud services too. Your cloud provider needs to have diverse backup solutions or you need more than one cloud. Nowadays, that also means you need more than one way to get to the cloud.

Backhoe fade is a fact of Internet access, although there are more and less risky solutions. All in all, you are better off with dedicated Internet access that has an SLA or Service Level Agreement. The really cheap Internet services, DSL and Cable, are shared and not dedicated to you alone. They are also treated as “information services” not telecom services, meaning that the providers don’t jump nearly as high or as fast when something goes wrong. T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber and SONET perform better, have faster mean times to repair and cost more... as you would expect.

It’s good to have diversity in your connectivity. Two T1 lines are better than one. Ethernet over Copper using multiple pairs is more reliable than anything coming in on a single pair. Even better is copper backup for fiber services, even thought it may be slower. There is no one cable that has both the copper wires and fiber strands in it. A cable broadband service can be an inexpensive backup service to your dedicated lines since it doesn’t use telco wiring. Wireless broadband is an excellent backup that also doesn’t have to be that costly. Your smartphone gives you a level of redundancy when your desktop PC goes down. There are fixed wireless services designed for business backup running on 3G and 4G cellular networks. You can set these up for automatic failover so that service won’t be interrupted if you lose a landline.

How much you need to concern yourself with redundancy and disaster recovery depends on what happens when you lose your connection to the Internet. Is it a minor inconvenience or does everything come to a screeching halt? If that’s the case, make sure you have at least two ways of connecting and getting your work done. They don’t have to be the same bandwidth or guaranteed availability. Just make sure that there is no single point of failure that will knock them both out at the same time. There are lots of different services available. Check prices and features so you can get the best mix of business bandwidth services available for your particular location.

Internet Wholesale Bandwidth Options

There are two types of organizations that buy Internet bandwidth. Most are end users. They want the access for their employees. The others are resellers. They take large Internet connections and divvy up the bandwidth to hundreds or thousands of individuals and businesses. These are Internet Service Providers (ISPs) looking to buy at wholesale and sell at retail.

The largest networks in the world, called Tier 1, don’t purchase Internet access. They are part of the core network itself. Those major world wide networks exchange traffic on basis of equals called peering. Each network gets as much traffic as it sends to the others, so all benefit and no money is exchanged.

Everyone else has to get to the Internet by accessing one of these Tier 1 networks. The next level down, the Tier 2 networks, are also very large Internet service providers. Since they don’t have the enormous global traffic to participate in peering, they purchase what is called IP Transit. This is Internet access sold on a per Megabit per second per month basis.

Smaller Tier 3 networks can purchase IP Transit from Tier 2 networks, if they are large enough to have an assigned AS or Autonomous System number (ASN) to identify them as part of the Internet. Large scale ISPs fall into this category as well as some large corporations and other organizations.

Local and regional Internet Service Providers, including WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers), buy DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. DIA connections are like point to point private lines, except that one end connects to the Internet. Other private line characteristics still apply. The bandwidth provided is completely dedicated to the ISP and not shared with anyone else. There are generally SLAs or Service Level Agreements that spell out characteristics such as maximum latency, jitter and packet loss as well as time to respond to outages and time to make repairs.

Dedicated also means that there are no extra charges for heavily loading the line. You can use the entire capacity of the circuit in both directions or only some of it. The price is the same.

The smallest DIA service is usually a T1 line running at 1.5 Mbps. This is a symmetrical service, meaning 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download. Usually the download path is much heavier loaded than the upload path for typical Internet access. If fact most consumer Internet access is sold with 5x to 10x higher speeds on download than upload. For business users, upload speeds can be important when transferring large files to remote backup sites and servers within colocation centers.

Obviously, T1 lines can’t serve a large user base but they work great for WiFi hotspots and rural or subdivision WISP service where signed-up customers number in the dozens, not hundreds. A nice feature of T1 lines is that they can be bonded by adding more lines to double, triple and quadruple bandwidth up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. The other nice feature of T1 lines is that they are available where other line services don’t reach. If you can get business telephone system into a facility, you can probably get T1 DIA service.

The next increment in traditional telecom bandwidth is DS3, also called T3 lines. This service runs at 45 Mbps which is large enough for a good size service provider to offer competitive bandwidth. Beyond that, SONET fiber optic services include OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps and OC48 at 2.5 Gbps are very popular.

A strong competitor to T-Carrier and SONET bandwidth is Carrier Ethernet. It comes in two flavors, Ethernet over Copper (EoC) typically from 1 to 50 Mbps and Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps. In a some metropolitan areas, you can also get EoFW or Ethernet over Fixed Wireless at DS3 and Fast Ethernet speeds. Where available, Carrier Ethernet tends to have considerably better pricing than other services.

Do you resell Internet access to other ISPs or end users? If so, see if you can get better wholesale pricing on Dedicated Internet Access and IP Transit services.