Trade In Your T1 Line For 10 Mbps Ethernet

Is your T1 line lease about to come up for renewal or has it already expired and you’re just paying month to month? Don’t be too quick to re-sign that agreement until you see if you can get 10 Mbps Ethernet for the same money.

What? How can that be? Business telecom services are priced on both bandwidth and distance from the carrier. How can you possibly expect to get 10 Mbps for the same price as 1.5 Mbps at the same location?

It is indeed possible for many business locations to upgrade from the T1 service they’ve had for years to much higher bandwidths. It’s all because of a revolution that has taken place in the telecommunications market recently. You’re aware that traditional landline telephone services are being quickly replaced by wireless and VoIP telephony. Well, the same thing has been happening with the underlying networks. They’re all being upgraded from switched circuit time division multiplexing technology to packet switched IP networking.

This revolution in wide area networking (WAN) technology has also opened the door for new competitive carriers who don’t have a legacy telephony switching system to support. They’ve hit the ground running with all-IP fiber optic networks with both fiber and copper access. In some cases, wireless access at speeds similar to T1 lines is also available.

To be fair, the pricing on both T1 lines and the newer Ethernet services have dropped substantially over the last few years. But you wouldn’t be aware of that unless you shopped competitively for bandwidth using a service such as GeoQuote. The Telarus GeoQuote search engine calculates the distance from your business address to the nearest carrier points of presence (POPs). It then accesses the carrier databases to get pricing information for various levels of service.

Now, here’s what’s really exciting about the quotes I’ve seen coming out of GeoQuote lately. T1 line prices have been on a steady and rapid decline over the last few years. At the same time, Ethernet services have been expanding at a rapid rate with both higher bandwidths and lower costs per Mbps. If you are a long time user of T1 line services, you may well be paying a small fortune on your T1 line lease. But I’ve seen some quotes for 10 x 10 Mbps Ethernet coming in at less than the quotes for standard T1 that were common only a few years ago. If you simply traded in your expired T1 line lease for Ethernet over Copper (EoC) service, you could easily double or triple your bandwidth for the same cost. It’s even possible in some cases to move from 1.5 Mbps to 10 Mbps without having to increase your telecom budget.

Like all business telecom services, Ethernet pricing and availability is highly dependent on location. In fact, two businesses across the street from each other could have different lease rates for exactly the same service. So, how do you find out what’s available and how much it is going to cost? The fast and easy way is to simply run an online check for business Ethernet service for your building’s address and see what shows up. A Telarus consultant will be happy to discuss your particular needs and budget and see if there are any current special offers that are available at even better than the standard rates.