200Mbps to 500Mbps Leased Line Costs in the UK

Who is a 200Mbps to 500Mbps leased line right for?

The band sits between the entry-level 100Mbps circuit and a full 1Gbps leased line. It suits sites of roughly 30 to 150 staff that have moved their core systems to the cloud, run voice and video over the same connection, and need the symmetric upload and the SLA that business broadband cannot give them, but do not yet move the volume of data that justifies committing a full gigabit. Design studios pushing large files to clients, professional-services firms on Microsoft 365 with hosted telephony, and multi-tenant offices sharing one circuit are the typical buyers.

Because a leased line is uncontended, 500Mbps dedicated is 500Mbps up and down at nine in the morning as well as at midnight. A 500Mbps business broadband product shares its capacity with the street and its upload is a fraction of the headline figure.

How to read the regional table

Every figure in the table and the quick answer comes from AMVIA's published connectivity corpus: the aggregate of real quotes issued to UK businesses, with no customer identifiers, every cell built from at least five quotes, and each figure stamped with its as-of date and sample size. The numbers are quoted amounts, which is the view you see when you go to market; the won-only view, which is closer to a transacted price, is published separately on the UK Business Connectivity Pricing Index and the two are never blended. The rules for how cells are built, rolled up and suppressed are on the methodology page. Regions whose sample for this band is under the publishing threshold show the UK-wide roll-up and are labelled as such; nothing is interpolated.

Treat the median as the price a typical quote lands at, not a price list. The middle-half range tells you how much the postcode matters: a site with two or three networks already in the building sits at the bottom of it, a site that needs new duct sits at the top or above it.

The gap between this band and 1Gbps is small, and that matters

Look at the UK medians for this band and for 1Gbps in the quick answer. The two are close because carriers deliver 200Mbps to 500Mbps services on a 1Gbps bearer. The fibre, the optics and the installation cost the carrier the same; the saving is the committed bandwidth. Two consequences follow. First, if your headcount or your data volume is growing, pricing 1Gbps alongside this band is worth the extra line on the quote, because the uplift is often less than a second installation would cost you in two years' time. Second, if you do take 200Mbps or 500Mbps, confirm in writing that the bearer is 1Gbps so an upgrade is a configuration change rather than a new order. The full UK leased line cost breakdown covers every tier side by side.

Lead times and one-off costs

Delivered circuits in this band have a shorter median order-to-live time than 1Gbps in the corpus, but the sample is small and the slowest tenth still runs well past six months, so plan on three months and keep a 4G or 5G router as a bridge if the move date is fixed. Installation is usually waived on a 36-month term. The one-off cost to plan for is the excess construction charge, levied when a carrier has to build fibre to the premises; the corpus distribution for ECCs is published on the excess construction charges page, and the single best way to avoid one is to have every carrier survey the address before you sign with any of them. Pairing the circuit with backup connectivity on a different network protects against the outages that an SLA compensates for but cannot prevent.

How to get the best price in this band

Commit to 36 months, ask for the committed rate to be priced on a 1Gbps bearer, and compare every carrier that reaches the postcode rather than renewing with the incumbent. AMVIA runs that comparison across BT Openreach, Virgin Media Business, CityFibre, Zayo and the regional networks, surfaces any construction charge before you commit, and manages the install end to end. Start with your postcode and a tailored quote typically lands within 24 hours.