FTTP vs Leased Line — Which Does Your Business Actually Need?

When businesses outgrow basic broadband, two options come up repeatedly: FTTP (full fibre broadband) and Ethernet leased lines. Both are fast. Both are reliable. But they're fundamentally different products, and choosing the wrong one means either overpaying significantly or getting a connection that doesn't meet your needs.

Here's the honest guide to how they differ and which is right for your situation.

The Core Difference

FTTP is a contended service — you share the underlying fibre network infrastructure with other businesses and homes in your area. Your "up to 1Gbps" line is the maximum available, but actual speeds depend on network demand. In practice, daytime business speeds on a quality FTTP product are excellent — typically 85–95% of the headline speed.

A leased line is an uncontended, dedicated circuit. The bandwidth is yours alone, guaranteed at all times, in both directions (symmetric). Nobody else's traffic affects yours. When you order 200Mbps, you get 200Mbps at 3pm on a Monday when the whole business district is online.

Head-to-Head Comparison

When FTTP Is the Right Choice

FTTP is the right choice for the vast majority of businesses:

• Teams of up to 30–40 staff using cloud software, video calls and VoIP
• Businesses where budget matters and the cost difference between FTTP and leased line (typically £120–£300/month extra) isn't justified by the performance gain
• Businesses with relatively standard connectivity needs — no massive file transfers, no latency-critical operations, no contractual uptime obligations to clients
• New businesses or short lease premises where the flexibility of a lower-commitment connection is valuable

When a Leased Line Is the Right Choice

A leased line is worth the premium cost when:

• Downtime has direct financial consequences — call centres, e-commerce operations, financial services, healthcare systems where an outage means lost revenue or compliance failure
• Upload speed is critical — heavy cloud backup, video production, large file transfer operations where symmetric speed matters
• You have an SLA obligation to your own clients that requires you to guarantee your own uptime
• 50+ staff on a single connection where contention risk on FTTP becomes meaningful
• Multi-site businesses where a leased line at the primary site connects to SD-WAN distribution across locations

The Hybrid Approach — Best of Both

Many West Midlands businesses get the best outcome by combining both: a leased line as the primary connection for guaranteed performance, with an FTTP or 4G circuit as an automatic failover. This costs less than running two leased lines but provides better resilience than a single connection of either type.

Telexico's Assure X product automates this — monitoring both connections and failing over within 30 seconds without any manual intervention.

How to Decide

Answer these three questions:

1. If your internet was down for 4 hours, what would it cost you in lost business? If the answer is more than £200–£300, a leased line SLA pays for itself.
2. Do you upload large files regularly (video, large datasets, regular backups of TB-scale data)? If yes, the symmetric upload speed of a leased line is worth the premium.
3. Do you have a contractual obligation to clients that depends on your connectivity? If yes, you need an SLA-backed product.

If you answered no to all three, FTTP with an Assure X failover is almost certainly the right answer.