Anish Pandey · 2026-01-25 · 10 min read
SoftAxis Technologies, a 60-person software services company in Hyderabad's Madhapur tech corridor, was running their entire business — client video calls, cloud development environments, VPN to client servers, and internal tools — on a 200 Mbps ACT Fibernet broadband connection. It worked most of the time. But 'most of the time' in a software services business where clients are in the US and Germany means billing losses the moment the connection drops. In 2024, SoftAxis tracked 47 outages totalling 31 hours of downtime. At ₹8,000 per developer-hour (their blended billing rate), that was ₹2.48 lakh in unrecoverable lost productivity — and they had not counted the client relationship cost.
Broadband, even very fast broadband, is a shared medium. Your 200 Mbps connection is shared with other subscribers in your building and area. During peak hours — typically 9 AM to 11 AM and 7 PM to 10 PM — that shared bandwidth degrades. For a family watching Netflix at home, this is an inconvenience. For a developer on a video call with a client in Texas at 9 AM IST, it is a dropped meeting. The second issue is the SLA. Consumer and business broadband plans in India typically offer 99% uptime — which sounds impressive until you calculate it: 99% uptime allows for 87 hours of downtime per year. A leased line SLA typically guarantees 99.9% or 99.95% uptime, which caps downtime at 4.38 hours and 2.19 hours per year respectively. For SoftAxis, the difference between 31 hours of downtime and 4 hours of downtime was worth ₹2.16 lakh per year.
A leased line is a dedicated, symmetrical internet connection with a committed information rate (CIR) — meaning the bandwidth you pay for is available to you and only you, 24 hours a day, regardless of what your neighbours are doing on their connections. The symmetrical part matters enormously for modern businesses: a 100 Mbps leased line gives you 100 Mbps upload and 100 Mbps download simultaneously. A 200 Mbps broadband gives you 200 Mbps download but typically only 20 to 30 Mbps upload. For businesses on video conferencing, uploading to cloud storage, accessing remote servers, or running SaaS apps — upload speed is just as important as download. SoftAxis was running eight concurrent video calls daily, each consuming approximately 3 to 5 Mbps of upload bandwidth — a total of 40 Mbps just for calls, on a connection with only 30 Mbps committed upload.
our team worked with Tata Communications to provision a 100 Mbps symmetrical leased line to SoftAxis's Madhapur office. The provisioning time from order to go-live was 21 working days — Tata's standard lead time for the Hyderabad tech corridor. During this time, our team configured the Cisco router that connects to the leased line, set up traffic prioritisation (QoS) so that video calls and VPN traffic were prioritised over background tasks like backups and software updates, and tested failover to the ACT broadband as a backup line. The failover configuration meant that if the leased line ever went down (it has not in 11 months), SoftAxis's network would automatically switch to broadband within 30 seconds — invisible to end users.
Eleven months after switching to the leased line, SoftAxis's network team ran a comparison. Downtime events: 0 (versus 47 in the previous 12 months). Average latency to AWS Mumbai region: 4ms (versus 12 to 22ms variable on broadband). Developer complaints about connection quality: reduced from an average of 6 per week to zero in the last seven months. One result surprised everyone: the development team's cloud environment usage went up by 40% once the connection was reliable. The developers had been working around the unreliable connection — doing local development instead of using the cloud IDE — and now switched back to the faster cloud workflow. That productivity improvement was not in any ROI projection.
A 100 Mbps symmetrical leased line in a major Indian city (Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai) typically costs between ₹15,000 and ₹35,000 per month depending on the provider, the building's existing fibre infrastructure, and the contract term. SoftAxis pays ₹22,000 per month for their Tata Communications 100 Mbps line. Their previous ACT broadband cost ₹4,500 per month. The additional cost is ₹17,500 per month, or ₹2.1 lakh per year. Against ₹2.48 lakh in lost productivity per year from downtime (before counting the productivity improvement from reliable cloud usage), the ROI is positive from month one. The 45-day payback period comes from the fact that SoftAxis had three particularly bad outages in October-November 2024 that each cost over ₹30,000.
Not every business needs a leased line. If your team works primarily on local applications and internet is used mainly for browsing and email, standard broadband is sufficient. But if your business matches any of these criteria — more than 20 people on simultaneous video calls, developers or designers using cloud-based tools, accessing a VPN to client or data centre servers, running a contact centre or customer support desk — then broadband's variable performance and shared bandwidth will directly impact your productivity and client relationships. We provide leased line connectivity through Tata Communications, ACT Fibernet Business, and other tier-1 providers, with provisioning support, router configuration, and ongoing network management.
The internet is the infrastructure of a modern business. For companies whose revenue depends on consistent connectivity — and that is most companies in 2026 — a leased line is not a luxury. SoftAxis Technologies did not need faster internet. They needed internet that was always on, always at the speed they paid for, and always prioritising the right traffic. If you are tracking downtime or frustrated with variable internet performance, the solution is known and the cost is calculable. Let us run the numbers for your business.
Topics: Internet Leased Line, Network Connectivity, Business Internet, Dedicated Internet, IT Infrastructure, Hyderabad