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 1Mbit/s, 2Mbit/s and 4Mbit/s wide area network (WAN) connections backed by service level agreements (SLAs) to more UK firms.

Subscribers pay a setup fee of £1,995, which includes the cost of a Cisco 2611XM router and installation, then annual rental fees of £3,995 for the 1Mbit/s service, £5,795 for the 2Mbit/s service and £9,495 for the 4Mbit/s service. The price of the 2Mbit/s 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 a shared medium, with one-to-one contention rates and what EasyNet says is 99.9 percent guaranteed available bandwidth. "We have measured 99.9 percent 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.

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