Any recommendations on Leased Lines?

[FatalSaviour]

Since our office move, our internet speeds have plummetted. Whereas 14Mb down and 1.2Mb up were standard before, a 300m move as the crow flies has resulted in speeds of about 4Mb down and 0.8Mb up now. I've been told by BeThere (and BT, who we have a separate ADSL line to provide a secondary WAN with) that the increase in line length is such that that's about all we can get.
The office that this relates to has about 20 users, and the internet is now painfully slow at times.

Looking into alternative options, we're not in a cabled area, so as far as I'm aware, this pretty much leaves a Leased Line.
Having looked into the costs, Entanet have quoted us £2950 for a install of a 100Mb bearer and a 10Mb capped service (with monthly rental at £585).
If the service is worth it, those costs are ok (the BT quote was significantly more!), which is why I'm just after any alternatives that I may not have considered, or opinions on Enta's service.

Having had no experience of Leased Lines before now, am I right in thinking that it should be fairly simply to connect a Draytek 2820's secondary WAN to the managed Cisco router provided (or alternatively - and probably more likely, abandon the 2820 and go straight to a Gigabit switch for use on the rest of our network?).

Thanks for your help guys!

[Jay]

We used to have a pipe to BT with enta and we gave up with it, their customer support was really poor

[nichomach]

We go through Thus, who are now a C&W subsidiary, and they've been pretty good - http://www.thus.net/ . As an aside, have you checked whether you have a chance of a better service with SDSL? Regarding the Draytek, theoretically no problem; I would think you'd have to disable the ADSL (WAN1) connection, otherwise it'll keep retrying that. I wouldn't run the leased line straight into your switch from the router since the router's probably not set to filter anything.

[g8ina]

I always found ENTA to be pretty good on customer service. At least I always got to speak to a real engineer within 2-3 minutes.

Lots of companies in the TF area use them and I know 2 or 3 of them, and they were always happy too.

I am out of touch with the TF area since 2008 though, so cant say anything about their perfomance since then.

[chadders]

line bonding with Be?

[badass]

Since our office move, our internet speeds have plummetted. Whereas 14Mb down and 1.2Mb up were standard before, a 300m move as the crow flies has resulted in speeds of about 4Mb down and 0.8Mb up now. I've been told by BeThere (and BT, who we have a separate ADSL line to provide a secondary WAN with) that the increase in line length is such that that's about all we can get.
The office that this relates to has about 20 users, and the internet is now painfully slow at times.

Looking into alternative options, we're not in a cabled area, so as far as I'm aware, this pretty much leaves a Leased Line.
Having looked into the costs, Entanet have quoted us £2950 for a install of a 100Mb bearer and a 10Mb capped service (with monthly rental at £585).
If the service is worth it, those costs are ok (the BT quote was significantly more!), which is why I'm just after any alternatives that I may not have considered, or opinions on Enta's service.

Having had no experience of Leased Lines before now, am I right in thinking that it should be fairly simply to connect a Draytek 2820's secondary WAN to the managed Cisco router provided (or alternatively - and probably more likely, abandon the 2820 and go straight to a Gigabit switch for use on the rest of our network?).

Thanks for your help guys!

Is th internet use of all of the other staf legit and business related?
Get a web proxy/filter with a local cache. We have one with an 8GB cache and the cache alone has effectively doubled our bandwidth on average.

[PeteK]

abandon the 2820 and go straight to a Gigabit switch for use on the rest of our network?).

Hi. You can't do that. You will need a device at the network edge to perform the NAT, so a unless your leased line provider will do the NAT/port forwarding for you, you will need a router on the edge. The Draytek will be OK for 10/20Mb/s but you will need something more industrial if you expand above that kind of level.

We use http://www.uk-leased-line.co.uk/

Might be worth a quote. Judging by their prices, could be a bit cheaper perhaps?
I understand the burstable products allow you to buy a commited data allowance but get a higher speed so could save a few quid a month too..

[oldskooladdict]

We have been using Exponential E for a while. I can't remember the exact pricing (I believe you can barter) but the setup costs were similar to those you mention, it's for a 100mb line throttled to 50mb and I believe the monthly is 800 or so.

We're just moving office too as it goes and Exponential are still coming out good value for 100mb throttled to 50mb. We jumped from a 24mb BE line to that, so yeah, we noticed a difference

[oldskooladdict]

Is th internet use of all of the other staf legit and business related?
Get a web proxy/filter with a local cache. We have one with an 8GB cache and the cache alone has effectively doubled our bandwidth on average.

Interesting point, when we had BE and it was very slow we blocked as many video streaming sites as we could - iplayer, youtube, googlevideo etc, oh and facebook. It reduced the traffic quite a bit, but it did make me pretty unpopular! lol

[ikvgroup]

We use a company called <deleted - advertising> and we pay something like 800 a month for a 100mb. We did get a quote for a 10mb for another office and that was something like 450 a month. Good value and good SLA and service. I would recommend them.

[peterb]

ikvgroup - please contact HEXUS advertising if yopu wish to ptromote your company on HEXUS.

http://www.hexus.net/content/static/advertise.php

[oldboy47]

+1 for the Nichomach suggestion - ask about SDSL first otherwise ask any of the major carriers for their leased line proposals. The downside is that your initial contact might be with a call centre numpty with zero knowledge and no textual guides.

[gss03]

Speak to Dietmar Wand @ Lumison - 0131 514 1000
They do Leased lines.

[FatalSaviour]

Hi guys, thanks very much for all of the replies. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the usage, it doesnt look as though having a huge cache will improve matters much. I've looked into bonded ADSL, although it would appear that we will need to utilise 4 lines to achieve download speeds anywhere near what we used to have. Once line rental is taken into account, the costs incurred are pushing me to recommend fibre.
Having had a quote from ManagedComms, for a 10Mb service on a 100Mb bearer, the install cost is £2.5k, and just under £600pm rental. What's swinging it for me in favour of Enta is that MC are willing to accommodate this on a 12 month contract, which is useful, as we're not sure whether we'll even be in the same premises in 3 years time.
I'm just wondering whether anyone has any testimonials as to ManagedComms service, horror stories or praise, before we potentially sign off on this.
Thanks in advance all

[abaxas]

Any 'line' can be painfully slow. It all depends on what it is being used for?

Instead of throwing money at the problem, why not throw some qos as it?

Or at least find out what is happening when it goes 'slow'.

[PeteK]

Having had a quote from ManagedComms, for a 10Mb service on a 100Mb bearer, the install cost is £2.5k, and just under £600pm rental. What's swinging it for me in favour of Enta is that MC are willing to accommodate this on a 12 month contract, which is useful,....

I'm just wondering whether anyone has any testimonials as to ManagedComms service, horror stories or praise, before we potentially sign off on this.

We have a couple of customers with MC circuits and I have to say we have been far from impressed with their service thus far. Having to deal with the CS has not been pleasant. I know one for sure is not going to renew.

I happened to be doing a quote this morning for another customer and spoke to Jo at http://www.uk-leased-line.co.uk/ who said 12 month contracts weren't a problem either and as they utilise the same underlying telcos as MC was sure if they had quoted that, UKLL could beat it on both install and rental suggesting closer to 500 pm would be in order.

Again have to say more than happy with them and we have about fifty circuits there at present.