Leased lines for Edinburgh businesses — dedicated internet that never lets you down
A leased line gives your business a private, dedicated internet connection — unshared, uncontended and backed by a formal service level agreement. When your business depends on being online, a leased line removes internet reliability from the list of things you have to worry about.
What is a leased line and how is it different from standard broadband?
A leased line is a dedicated internet connection — a private line running from your Edinburgh premises to the internet exchange, used only by your business. Unlike standard broadband — which is shared infrastructure where your connection speed varies depending on how many of your neighbours are online at the same time — a leased line gives you guaranteed, consistent speeds at all times.
The key differences:
- Dedicated: the bandwidth is yours alone — no sharing, no contention, no peak-time slowdowns
- Symmetrical: upload speed equals download speed — important for businesses sending large files, running video calls or hosting services
- Guaranteed: the speed in your contract is the speed you get, backed by a formal SLA
- Resilient: leased lines come with faster fault response times and often include failover options
Is a leased line right for your Edinburgh business?
Leased lines cost more than standard broadband — but for the right business, the reliability, performance and peace of mind they provide are worth significantly more than the price difference.
Businesses where downtime has a direct financial cost
If your business can't trade, process payments or serve customers without internet access, the cost of a leased line is easily justified by a single avoided outage. For Edinburgh retail, hospitality, financial services and healthcare businesses, this calculation often stacks up clearly
Businesses with high upload requirements
Standard broadband is asymmetric: download speeds are much faster than upload. For businesses regularly uploading large files, running video conferencing at scale, backing up significant data volumes or hosting services on-site, the symmetrical speeds of a leased line make a material operational difference.
Multi-site businesses
A leased line provides the stable, predictable connectivity that site-to-site networking and cloud-based phone systems (hosted PBX, VoIP) require to work reliably. Variable broadband speeds cause problems; consistent leased line speeds eliminate them.
Professional and financial services
Law firms, accountancies, investment managers and other regulated businesses often need the formal SLA, guaranteed uptime and documented fault resolution that a leased line provides for compliance and client service reasons.
What the service level agreement actually means
A leased line SLA is a contractual commitment to performance and fault resolution — not a best-efforts promise. Through BT's business network, leased line SLAs typically include:
- Engineer response time — an engineer on-site within a defined timeframe following a fault report
- Mean time to repair — a maximum time to restore service, with financial remedies if it's exceeded
- Network uptime guarantee — a committed availability percentage over the contract term
- 24/7 fault reporting — access to network support around the clock, not just business hours
For businesses whose board or clients ask about business continuity arrangements, a leased line with a documented SLA is a straightforward answer to the question.
Leased line questions
How much does a leased line cost?
+How long does leased line installation take?
+Can we have a leased line as a backup to our existing broadband?
+What speeds are available on a leased line?
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Want to find out if a leased line makes sense for your business?
Get in touch and we'll do a quick assessment — your location, your current connection, what you use it for and whether the cost of a leased line is justified by your requirements. No jargon, no obligation.