Easynet takes DSL leased lines across UK

Regional broadband service provider extends its services

Regional broadband service provider Easynet has expanded its SureStream leased line services beyond London to central areas of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The move brings the offer of dedicated symmetric 1Mbps, 2Mbps and 4Mbps wide area network connections backed by service level agreements (SLAs) to more UK firms.

Subscribers pay a set-up fee of £1,995, which includes the cost of a Cisco 2611XM router and installation, then annual rental fees of £3,995 for the 1Mbps service, £5,795 for the 2Mbps service and £9,495 for the 4Mbps service.

The price of the 2Mbps connection can compare favourably to the price of an E1 leased line from other providers in some cases.

"Our experience in London is that we get a 50/50 mix of existing leased-line customers looking to reduce their costs, and firms looking to upgrade their ADSL and SDSL links to connections offering dedicated bandwidth and SLAs," said Easynet marketing director Martin Saunders.

Easynet's service is only available to customers within a few kilometres of one of the firm's exchanges, however, and does not provide national coverage.

SureStream is based on HDSL technology that uses the copper telephone cables of BT's local loop to transmit data.

Unlike ADSL or SDSL, SureStream is a dedicated rather than shared medium, with one-to-one contention rates and what Easynet claims is 99.9 per cent guaranteed available bandwidth.

"We have measured 99.9 per cent availability in our trials, and it is a realistic [figure] rather than just something we tell the customers," said Saunders.

Easynet's 4,450km fibre optic network spans 50 UK towns and cities, and the firm expects to offer SureStream services in other parts of the country later this year.

The company also provides ADSL and SDSL services to businesses and consumers, some backed with limited SLAs.