Ethernet & Leased Lines

It means the circuit is yours alone. Unlike broadband, you are not sharing capacity with other businesses, so the speed you buy is the speed you get at all times — including at four in the afternoon when a shared connection in a busy area is at its worst. It is also symmetric, so sending is as fast as receiving.

Then you are past a single circuit and into a network. The range runs from one standard broadband connection up to a full PWAN or MPLS network joining every site, with voice and data prioritised across your LAN, WAN and internet breakout so a large file transfer cannot degrade a call. We will tell you which rung of that ladder you actually need.

It depends on whether a bearer already serves your building. Where one does, delivery is a matter of weeks; where civil works are needed it runs to months, and occasionally a wayleave from a landlord is required as well. We survey the site first and give you a realistic date before you sign anything rather than an optimistic one afterwards.

It is the speed switched on across your circuit, which is not necessarily the size of the bearer delivered to your building. The bearer is the physical capacity installed; the committed data rate, or CDR, is what runs across it. The two are ordered separately, and committed data rates are custom rather than chosen from a fixed list.

Order the bearer for where the site is heading and the committed data rate for where it is now — the two are set separately, so they do not have to match. Which bearer sizes can actually reach your building depends on what is already in the ground there, so that gets checked at the address before anything is ordered.

Ethernet Lite delivers a guaranteed, synchronous service over copper rather than fibre, using EFM, GEA or EoFTTC. It suits buildings where a full fibre build is not available or not practical but ordinary broadband is not dependable enough. The circuit is still ordered as an Ethernet service with a fix-time SLA, over the infrastructure already serving the site.

A hosted AS number lets you run your own routing without registering and administering an autonomous system yourself. It comes alongside internet transit, so you can advertise your own IP space and control how traffic reaches you. It is the option to ask about if you already run your own edge rather than taking a standard internet connection.

It commits to a time by which a fault is fixed, not only a time by which someone answers the call. Ethernet circuits carry fix-time SLA guarantees, and Service Assured fix-time guarantees are available alongside them. We do not publish a single fix time here — ask which one applies to the circuit you are quoted.