How Can a Leased Line Save me Money?

Simple – run your telephony over it.

Yes, it’s a simple answer to a simple question but I guess if you’re reading this article, you want to know a little more, rather than just taking my word for it?

The key components of this discussion are reliability, speed and what we call the service level agreement. Until recent times, internet connections have not always been fast or reliable enough to support a stable voice platform.

A service level agreement is a contractual obligation on the supplier of a service, to fix the service in a guaranteed time frame, in the event of an outage. If the service level agreement is not met, then there is often a financial penalty on the supplier, so it really is in their best interests to get on with fixing the broken service.

So, where I am leading with this is simple - traditional digital telephone lines have a service level agreement. ADSL and standard broadband connections do not.   Therefore it may not make sense to run large voice network over standard ADSL services as it would not in theory be reliable enough. However, an internet leased line or EFM do have a service level agreement which is the same, or at least very similar to that of a digital phone line service, so therefore it makes perfect sense to get rid of any traditional phone line services and run them over the internet connection instead.

As an example, let’s make up a scenario…… ABC Widgets Ltd runs a call centre selling their products over the telephone and they have 30 channels of ISDN30 (that means 30 traditional voice channels). Each channel costs them £12 per month which means that in a year they pay £4,320 for the line rental alone. They also have a bonded ADSL internet service which costs them £125 per month (this includes the analogue phone line rental, ADSL service and the bonding package).  So in total they currently pay £5,820 per annum for their phone lines and internet connectivity combined. They also pay an annual maintenance charge for their onsite telephony hardware which costs them £800 per annum which now takes the cost up to £6,620 per annum, and this is before they have even made one phone call.

Now, as ABC Widgets Ltd is very near to their local telephone exchange which is enabled for EFM, they can achieve uncontended download and upload speeds of 14Mbp/s. The amount of data used for 30 channels of voice equates to 2Mb. This means that if they ran their voice over the new EFM line, then they would still have a whopping 12Mbp/s for internet and email traffic. The cost for this EFM service would cost them £3,800 per annum and on top of that they would need to rent the internet voice channels at £2 per channel per month, which means that their overall cost of telephony and internet would be £4,520.

This means that by migrating to a faster internet connection, ABC Widgets Ltd would save themselves £2,100 per annum.

It is also worth bearing in mind that call rates over the internet are far cheaper than on traditional ISDN lines as there are far less overheads and running costs.

In conclusion I think it is fair to say that the above example illustrates how a company can save money on their communication costs by moving to a faster and more reliable internet connection with the same service level agreement as what they are used to with their old, traditional telephony services.

CCS (Leeds) Ltd prides itself on giving honest, accurate and thorough advice so please get in touch if you would like to know more about any of the services that we have to offer.