A 10Gb leased line in the UK typically costs roughly £900 to £2,500 per month on a three-year term, with one-off install fees ranging from zero on standard builds to £5,000-£20,000+ where new fibre is needed. Price depends heavily on your postcode, proximity to fibre, and whether you buy a full 10Gb bearer or a lower committed speed on a 10Gb-capable port.
What a 10Gb leased line actually delivers
A 10Gb leased line is a dedicated, uncontended fibre circuit that gives your site up to 10 gigabits per second of symmetric bandwidth — the same speed down and up. Unlike broadband, the capacity is yours alone, not shared with neighbours, so performance stays predictable at 9am on a Monday just as it does at midnight.
The term '10Gb' usually describes the bearer — the physical port capacity delivered to your premises. You don't always pay for all 10Gb of throughput on day one. Many providers sell a 10Gb bearer with a lower committed data rate (CDR), say 1Gb or 5Gb, which you can uplift later with a config change rather than a new install. That flexibility is one of the main reasons businesses choose a 10Gb bearer even when they don't need the full speed yet.
You also get a proper service wrap: a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with guaranteed availability (typically 99.9%+), target fix times of a few hours, and symmetric speeds backed by the carrier. This is the 'thorough end' of connectivity, and it's priced accordingly. For the full picture on circuit types see our guide to leased lines.
10Gb leased line cost bands in the UK
Pricing varies more than most buyers expect, because it is driven by physical fibre as much as by bandwidth. As a rough guide for UK businesses on a typical three-year contract:
- 10Gb bearer with 1Gb committed speed: roughly £700-£1,200 per month
- 10Gb bearer with 5Gb committed: roughly £900-£1,800 per month
- Full 10Gb committed speed: roughly £1,400-£2,500+ per month
- One-off install: £0 on standard, fully-fibred sites; £2,000-£20,000+ where excess construction charges (ECCs) apply
What drives the price
The single biggest variable is distance to the nearest fibre point of presence. If your building already has fibre in it or on the street, a 10Gb build can be relatively cheap and quick. If the carrier has to trench new fibre across a road or up a private drive, excess construction charges can run into tens of thousands of pounds — sometimes dwarfing the rental itself.
The committed speed matters too. A 10Gb bearer limited to 1Gb costs far less than one running full 10Gb line rate, because you are buying less carrier backhaul capacity. Term length also moves the price: longer contracts (36 or 60 months) lower the monthly rental and often absorb install costs, while 12-month terms cost more per month.
Finally, resilience adds cost. A single circuit is the baseline. Add a diverse second fibre from a separate exchange, dual routers and automatic failover and you can roughly double the price. For many high-bandwidth sites that redundancy is the point — see our approach to backup connectivity and SD-WAN for blending circuits sensibly.
10Gb vs 1Gb: when do you really need it?
Most UK SMEs are comfortably served by a 1Gb leased line, which typically costs £300-£600 per month. The jump to 10Gb is a step change in capability and price, so it should be driven by evidence, not aspiration. The honest question is whether your current circuit is actually saturating.
You are likely to benefit from 10Gb if you move very large datasets routinely — media production, CAD and rendering, scientific data, or large nightly backups to the cloud. It also makes sense where a single site aggregates many users or where you host services that others connect into. If your 1Gb line regularly peaks at utilisation above 70-80% during the working day, that is a real signal.
If you are a 30-person office doing email, Microsoft 365, Teams calls and general browsing, 1Gb is almost certainly plenty, and a 10Gb bearer with 1Gb committed is a sensible middle path — you pay roughly 1Gb-plus pricing but can uplift in days if demand grows. Our connectivity and telecoms team can model your actual usage before you commit.
Is a 10Gb leased line worth it for your business?
The value case rests on three things: measurable demand, headroom, and what downtime costs you. If large transfers currently bottleneck your team, or cloud migrations stall overnight, the productivity recovered can justify the premium quickly. A high-bandwidth leased line is an operational investment, not a vanity spec.
Headroom is the quieter benefit. Buying a 10Gb bearer now, even on a 1Gb commit, means you avoid a fresh install and lead time when you grow. Full fibre builds can take 60-120 working days, so provisioning capacity ahead of need removes a future bottleneck for a modest extra monthly cost.
Where it is not worth it: if your uplift needs are modest, your applications are light, or your real pain is reliability rather than raw speed. In those cases a well-specified 1Gb line with resilience, plus tidy internal cabling and Wi-Fi, delivers more value than a 10Gb circuit you'll never fill. Good network consultancy will tell you which camp you're in.
How to get an accurate 10Gb quote
Headline prices only become real once a provider runs a formal quote against your exact postcode and, ideally, your building's connectivity records. A 'free fibre' marketing figure can vanish the moment a site survey finds excess construction charges, so treat any quote without a confirmed install cost as provisional.
To get a quote you can actually rely on, have a few details ready. The more precise you are, the fewer surprises later.
- Full site address and postcode (and floor/suite for multi-tenant buildings)
- Required committed speed now, and your likely ceiling in 2-3 years
- Contract term you want to compare (12, 36 or 60 months)
- Whether you need resilience or a diverse second circuit
- Any existing circuit utilisation data you can share
Buying 10Gb through a managed provider
There is a difference between buying a 10Gb circuit as a commodity and buying it as part of a managed service. On its own, a leased line is just capacity; the value comes from how it is installed, configured, secured and supported. A managed provider handles the carrier relationship, the router, the failover design and the ongoing monitoring under one SLA.
This matters most at high bandwidth, because a 10Gb circuit usually sits behind firewalls, switches and sometimes SD-WAN that all need sizing to match. A 10Gb line feeding a 1Gb firewall is wasted money. Joined-up design across network security and connectivity avoids that mismatch.
At CLI Secure we deliver connectivity, networking and support as one accountable team, with one number and one invoice, so there is no finger-pointing between the circuit provider and whoever manages your kit. If you want a realistic 10Gb quote for your site, contact us with your postcode and we'll run it properly.