FTTP and leased lines are both often described as "full fibre," which makes them sound more similar than they really are. The difference that matters for a business isn't the cable — it's what happens to your connection when everyone else on your street gets home from work.
What FTTP Actually Is
Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) runs fibre-optic cable directly to your building, replacing the old copper line for the "last mile." It's a big step up from older broadband, offering much faster speeds at a reasonable cost. The catch is that it's typically a contended service — you're sharing capacity with other users in your area, so performance can dip during busy periods, and upload speeds are usually significantly lower than download speeds.
What a Leased Line Actually Is
A leased line is a dedicated fibre connection, used by your business alone — nobody else's traffic shares it. That means the speed you're sold is the speed you actually get, consistently, with identical upload and download speeds and typically a much stronger service-level agreement backing it up. It costs considerably more than FTTP, which is the trade-off for that guaranteed, uncontended performance.
How to Decide Which You Need
FTTP is the right choice for most small and medium businesses — genuinely fast, reliable enough for day-to-day work, cloud services and video calls, at a sensible price. A leased line starts to make sense when your business depends on guaranteed, symmetrical bandwidth: heavy cloud-hosted phone system usage, large file transfers, hosting your own servers, or when any dip in connection quality has a direct, serious cost to the business.
For most businesses genuinely worried about connectivity risk rather than raw bandwidth, a second connection as backup — rather than upgrading to a leased line — is often the more cost-effective way to solve the actual problem, which is usually resilience, not speed.
What This Looks Like at REONEX
REONEX can advise on FTTP, leased lines and backup connectivity based on what your business actually needs, not the most expensive option available. See Business Broadband for more, including backup internet using 4G and 5G.