A private telecommunications circuit is used to connect two or more sites to give a required quality of service and/or to save costs. They are classed as “private” because they comprise resources that are usually exclusively allocated to their owner.
Private circuits are also known as leased lines because they are usually rented (ie leased) from telecommunication service providers such as BT. However, this is not always the case since private circuits can also be implemented using privately owned facilities such as cable or (more likely) radio connections.
There is also a third type of private circuit which is known as a virtual private circuit. These are created from standard internet connections and consequently use shared resources. Nevertheless, they look like “real” private circuit in terms of creating a dedicated point-to-point or point-to-multi-point secure connection.
Virtual private circuits are particularly useful for low demand connections where a “real” private circuit can’t be justified on cost grounds. Examples of virtual private circuits would be connections to employee homes or for road warriors who need to connect to the enterprise network from a variety of locations such as hotel rooms.
Most private circuits are now usually required for high demand un-contended internet connections in which the sites at each end of the private circuit would be the end-user’s data centre and the internet service provider’s gateway to the internet.
Once an internet private circuit (or leased line) is in place then virtual private circuits or networks (ie VPNs) can be created to connect to other sites. Internet leased lines are typically fibre-to-the-premise connections with bandwidth of between 10 Mbps and 1 Gbps.
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Get in touch with us if you have a specific requirement for a lesed line connection to the interent or if you wish to discuss how your business could make better and more cost-effective use of its existing telecommunications and internet infrastructure and services.
