Connectivity
January 2025 · All Articles
Leased lines explained for UK businesses. What they are, how they differ from broadband, who needs one and what they cost.
A leased line is a dedicated internet connection installed purely for your business. Unlike broadband — where your connection is shared with other businesses and households on the same local infrastructure — a leased line is yours alone. Nobody else uses it. Its capacity, performance and reliability belong entirely to your premises.
Dedicated vs shared: Broadband infrastructure is shared — your actual experience depends on what other people in your area are doing. A leased line is physically dedicated to you. Your 500Mbps leased line delivers exactly 500Mbps 24 hours a day regardless of what's happening on the network around you.
Symmetric speeds: Broadband typically provides faster download than upload. A leased line delivers equal upload and download speeds — critical for businesses with significant upload requirements (cloud backups, remote file access, video conferencing at scale).
Guaranteed SLA: Business broadband carries a 99.9% uptime SLA with same-day fault response. Leased lines carry a 99.95% SLA with a 4-hour engineer fix commitment and financial penalties if missed.
A leased line is the right choice when your business has 30+ staff relying on internet simultaneously, requires consistent symmetric upload speeds, operates mission-critical applications where downtime is genuinely costly, hosts servers or services that external parties access remotely, or simply cannot afford inconsistent performance during peak hours.
For businesses below this threshold, full fibre broadband with Assure X failover typically delivers 95% of the resilience at 20–30% of the cost.
Telexico leased lines start from £199/month for 100Mbps symmetric. 500Mbps from £280/month. 1Gbps from £380/month. Exact pricing depends on your location and distance to the nearest PoP. Get a site-specific quote by checking your postcode on our Ethernet page.
30–65 working days from order, depending on location and whether wayleave is required. Telexico manages the entire Openreach process including survey, build and active equipment installation.
Yes — your current broadband stays fully active throughout the installation. We install and test the leased line before you make any changes to existing services.
Telexico provides leased lines from 10Mbps to 10Gbps. For most West Midlands businesses, 100Mbps or 500Mbps symmetric provides excellent performance.
For businesses with 30+ staff or mission-critical operations: yes, a leased line is better. For most businesses with fewer staff, full fibre broadband plus Assure X failover provides a very compelling alternative at 20–30% of the cost.