If your business is shopping around for a new internet service, you’ve probably noticed that some services are ‘managed’, and some are ‘unmanaged’, but what do these terms really mean?

Understanding Managed Internet

GET A LEASED LINE QUOTE HERE

The difference between a managed internet service and a standard internet service is quite simple; a managed service is regulated and overseen by your chosen provider. This means that the company will be monitoring your service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to ensure that everything’s running smoothly.

This also ensures any faults that pop up on the line are dealt with effectively and efficiently. You may notice some leased line providers saying they’ll notice your connection is down before you do.

Managed internet services will work wonders for your business, it will allow you to free up IT staff and cut costs at the same time. Each ISP will have different features on their managed internet Leased Lines, you’ll just need to figure out what your requirements are and compare them to see what provider best fits your needs.

What Services Are Managed?

Unfortunately, managed internet access services aren’t all that common in the UK. This is disappointing because of the many advantages it can bring to businesses – particularly smaller businesses with limited resources. However, the good news is that all high speed leased line services in the UK are fully managed, and this is considered to be one of the greatest benefits of opting for a leased line for your business.

A dedicated ethernet service is often managed because these services come with built-in service level agreements, which means that faults must be fixed within a certain period. Providers, therefore, continually monitor the service so that they can ensure they can get to work on correcting faults as soon as they occur. This is extremely valuable for businesses that require 24/7 internet access for their company to perform, if internet is lost and not up and running as soon as possible then they could lose hundreds even thousands of pounds.

Managed Services can apply to a range of different business sectors, such as, IT, Business-to-business integration, supply-chain managed services, transportation, marketing, media, water, and power. Managed services can save your company money and time, so its worth investing in one if the opportunity arises.

We are going to focus on IT Managed Services for the moment. These services can include connectivity and bandwidth, storage, network monitoring, network monitoring security, disaster recovery, network security, infrastructure management & more. We will be focusing on the connectivity side of managed services.

What are the Advantages of Managed Internet?

There are a number of benefits of opting for a managed internet service such as a leased line, including:

• Almost instant correspondence from your provider should a fault appear
• 24/7 business-level customer support
• Fast speed and symmetric upload
• Fast, efficient, and effective fixes to comply with service level agreements
• Option for anti-virus, anti-spam, and web filtering to be built into your data network
• Frees up human and financial resources as web administrators not required

At its most basic, what a managed internet connection such as a leased line does is take over all the technical aspects of your connection. This removes the stresses of maintaining a fully operational IT service for your employees, leaving you with one less thing to think about.

However, the service is all yours, and as the managed internet is usually attached to a leased line, it means you won’t need to share your connection with anyone else. It’s all the advantages of a superfast connection, without any of the hassles.

Can I get an internet Leased line and what will it cost?

Fibre Ethernet Leased Lines are available in 100% of the UK, the only factor you have to consider is if you can afford to get it deployed to your premises. They are more expansive compared to fibre broadband because of the high perforamce they give you. So, if consistent speeds, a managed service, and reliable internet is mission critical to your business then Leased Lines are the connectivity service for you.

The cost of a Leased line depends on various aspects, such as, distance you are from the exchange point, how rural you are, how long you want the contract terms to be, the speed you require, if you incur any ECC’s etc. Each ISP will have different prices for the same service, one factor is the carrier that they resell from, i.e. Virgin or BT.

Another factor that effect the price is the Government Gigabit voucher scheme, with this incentive the government will give a £2,500 grant towards the cost of a Leased Line. There’re a few different requirements you must meet before you’re given the voucher, i.e. the speed must be 100MB or higher etc. This is a cost effective way of obtaining this brilliant internet access Leased Line.

Ultimately, the cost of your internet access connections depends on the distance of the connection between your premises and the providers point of presence & you will pay more for any service delivered over Ethernet. Fibre and copper offer different performance & if you business is internet reliant and needs high performance a leased line may be your only option.

To find the best prices you would need to go to each ISP, explain your requirements in great dept, wait to receive you quotes, then manually compare each individual price to find the cheapest/provider most suited to your business needs. This is a lengthy, monotonous process that takes up your valuable time and resources.Installs take around 45 working days, so bear this in mine when ordering a leased line.

Avoiding this mind-numbing task is easy, we can do all the leg work for you and compare the top providers in the UK to get the cheapest quotes and put you in touch with a provider that can meet all your business necessities.