Go Gigabit today..

Are you looking to upgrade your connection speed this year, but worried about connection costs?
5G Communications are part of the Government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme – offering businesses like yours up to £2,500 towards the infrastructure costs of a gigabit-capable connection, enabling you to make use of the latest technologies and gain a competitive advantage over your competitors.

Who’s Eligible?

Small and medium sized businesses with fewer than 250 employees and an annual turnover under £50 million. This includes sole traders.

How do the vouchers work?

Businesses that are eligible for gigabit vouchers can access the scheme through 5G Communications.
The chart below shows the step-by-step process that each voucher recipient will go through to activate their voucher:

What is a leased line?

A leased line is a private high-performance circuit leased by a common carrier between a customer and a service provider’s network. It is rented on an annual basis and usually carries voice and data or both.Leased lines are mostly used for either internet access (Internet) or used privately between two customer sites (Point to Point). Unlike a dial-up connection, a leased line is always active. Similarly unlike broadband, a leased line is not contended or shared and delivers dedicated guaranteed bandwidth straight to the internet backbone. Customers pay a premium for this line and it is supported by a comprehensive Service-Level Agreement (SLA) with a guaranteed fix time and a compensation clause. Otherwise referred to as a point to point, private circuit, private line or dedicated access.

Leased lines are made up of the following components:

• A router, managed by 5G Communications, is installed into a customer’s comms room. The circuit is presented with an RJ45 connector as standard.
• Depending upon location, a back haul circuit may be used to link a customer to their service provider’s point of presence and then onto the internet gateway. This will take place behind the scenes and may run over a third party’s national network.

Bandwidth can be tailored to a company’s exact requirements, ranging from 10Mbps to 1Gbps. The required speed could depend upon the number of employees accessing the internet or perhaps upon the applications used; some being more bandwidth intensive than others.

Once the appropriate speed has been achieved a network administrator might monitor the following:

• The number of users accessing the internet simultaneously at peak times.
• The type of services accessed by users i.e. email, voice, hosted CRM, Skype, music downloads etc the number of hits or visits internal servers receive.

Leased Lines are normally used by businesses that need:

• High quality 24/7 access to the internet with an SLA
• To run mission critical applications
• Fast upstream speeds, for example, remote workers accessing office based applications will be pulling away data from their office
• Unlimited Data
• Symmetrical connection

Dedicated circuits can carry telephone calls, video conferencing streams and WAN traffic

Leased lines can carry numerous different types of traffic ranging from internet traffic such as web pages, emails and video streaming, to WAN traffic – typically data sent between different offices of the same company.

Dedicated connections can also be used to carry telephone calls. Traditionally, many companies connect their telephone system to the public telephone network using pricey ISDN30 circuits. By using a dedicated leased line and SIP Trunking, companies can often do away with their legacy ISDN30 circuits, sending their phone calls over a cheaper uncontended circuit instead.

Video Conferencing

Ensure your video conferencing is not interrupted with a unreliable internet connection, and the quality is perfect.

Site to site PBX connectivity

Terminating a leased line with two PBX systems allowed customers to by-pass PSTN for inter-site telephony. This allowed the customers to manage their own dial plan (and to use short extensions for internal telephone number) as well as to make significant savings if enough voice traffic was carried across the connection (especially when the savings on the telephone bill exceeded the fixed cost).