T1 Line Cost At A New Low

Over the years, most companies have come to own T1 lines either sooner or later. Larger companies got them for dedicated Internet connections back when business was just getting acquainted with the Internet. Small operations often get into T1 lines after becoming frustrated with shared bandwidth information services, such as DSL and Cable. There’s only one thing not to like about T1 lines and that’s the cost... or is it?

If you think that T1 lines cost a small fortune, you probably remember getting a quote some time ago. Yes, less than a decade ago it wasn’t uncommon to pay $1,000 a month for a typical T1 line. I say typical because there are different flavors of T1 service and pricing has been very location dependent. Today, you might pay about a third of that in most locations nationwide.

Costs have plunged due to maturity of the service, deregulation that has opened the market to many more competitive carriers, and new technologies that now compete directly for your bandwidth dollar.

It’s never been a better time to get into T1 line service if it will meet your needs. Let’s take a look at how T1 lines work, what you can use them for, and how to decide if T1 or something else is the right service for your company.

T1 is one of the most mature telco technologies, developed by the Bell System for telephone trunking. T1 formed the basis of digital telephone service and later was pressed into service to transport data also. A half-century of experience means that T1 is well understood, almost universally available and well supported. As a tariffed telecom service, carriers take T1 seriously. Most are sold with an SLA or Service Level Agreement that spells out what you can expect in the way of availability, time to respond to an outage and mean time to repair.

T1 lines were designed to be provisioned on two pair of ordinary telephone wire. One pair is for transmit or upload. The other is for receive or download. This is a symmetrical bandwidth service. You get the same bandwidth in both directions and it is full duplex. You can transmit and receive at the same time. That was designed-in to support telephone conversations that are also full duplex.

The original use for T1 lines was telephone trunking. A trunk line supports multiple phone conversations. A T1 telephone line supports up to 24 separate conversations, each with its own synchronized channel. Think of these as individual business phone lines. A device called a channel bank can convert the 24 channels back and forth to 24 analog phone lines.

A more popular configuration of T1 telephone line is called ISDN PRI or T1 PRI. This also divides the T1 line into 24 channels but only 23 of them are used as phone lines. The last one is reserved for switching signals and data, such as Caller ID. ISDN PRI is very popular as a telephone trunk line that plugs directly into many PBX phone systems.

When used to transport data, the idea of channels is dispensed with and the entire payload of the line service is used to carry data packets. T1 has a payload of 1.536 Mbps. The actual line speed itself is 1.544 Mbps. The difference of 8 Kbps is overhead used to keep the line synchronized and for maintenance. A T1 line is typically said to provide 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth.

That bandwidth can be used to connect to the Internet in what is called DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. Dedicated means that you have exclusive use of the bandwidth at all times. Use as little or as much of it as you need. The remainder will still be available and not shared by other users.

T1 lines are also popular as point to point connections to link two business locations. A specialized use is to transmit digitized audio from radio station studios to rurally located transmitter sites. T1 is also the most popular backhaul technology that connects cellular wireless towers to telephone switching systems.

Has the cost of a T1 line come down enough to make it attractive for your business use? If so, you may also want to compare T1 against the newer Ethernet over Copper that typically offers twice the bandwidth for the same money. If EoC is available, it's an even better bargain. Get quotes now for EoC and T1 line services at your business locations.

Ciena Takes New Bandwidth Technologies On The Road

If you happen to be near Waltham, MA today, June 29, you have an opportunity to see the latest in carrier bandwidth technology right at your doorstep. Simply step into the Ciena Innovation Lab and check out the demos of their optical, Ethernet and software solutions. Next stop is White Marsh, MD on July 15.

What’s the Ciena Innovation Lab? It’s a semi trailer chock full of the newest telecom and networking developments. Here, take a look:



If you are involved with Gigabit and Terabit bandwidth applications, you are familiar with Ciena... or should be. Certainly, fiber optic service providers keep a keen eye on developments from the Ciena labs. But now major corporations, content providers and large medical organizations need to familiarize themselves with packet-optical transport and switching systems. Today, you may be just broaching the idea of installing Gigabit Ethernet service. Tomorrow, you may well be ordering dark fiber for your own private point to point networks.

Ciena now has platforms that make deploying 40G and 100G fiber optic connections as easy as 10G. They are ready to support carrier Ethernet services, including high speed access, backhaul and aggregation. Their software suites make it easier for you to manage optical networks, Ethernet services and other high bandwidth networks services.

Is your company ready to move up to gigabit and higher levels of service? If so, you’ll benefit from a discussion with our Telarus bandwidth brokerage consultants. No charge for this service, of course. Take just a minute or so and describe your bandwidth needs in an easy online inquiry.

WiMAX 2 Will Challenge Fiber For Speed

There is a notion going around that copper and wireless have about had their day in the great bandwidth race. Copper has gained a new lease on life as a last mile technology for Metro Ethernet service. Wireless has a unique position in that no wireline or fiber service can match it for mobility. But there’s a wireless technology in the works that may blow away fiber optic services even on the basis of speed.

Wireless bandwidth higher than fiber? Ha!

Well, not so fast. Not all fiber optic service are pumping out 10 GigE to users. In fact, a lot of fiber optic bandwidth is delivering 50 and 100 Mbps ports to customers. That’s especially true of FTTH or Fiber To The Home that is only now starting to approach 100 Mbps. What would you say to being able to pluck 100 to 300 Mbps out of the air anywhere in the city? Wouldn’t that make your netbook scream? Might you consider going wireless to the desktop with that kind of speed?

High bandwidths and low latency are the promise of a new standard in the works called 802.16m. If that number sounds familiar, it’s because you know 802.16e as the basis of WiMAX service. WiMAX is a mature standard based on SOFDMA (Scalable Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) and MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) radio technologies. It’s the platform used by Clearwire and Sprint for their CLEAR 4G broadband service, now expanding nationwide. This first generation WiMAX offers 3 to 6 Mbps downloads with citywide coverage. The upgrade will increase that more than an order of magnitude.

The 802.16m standard is now being dubbed WiMAX 2 to indicate it is a upgrade to the current international WiMAX standard. It’s a backward compatible upgrade, which is certain to ease deployment.

What will WiMAX 2 be used for? It will certainly be in high demand by mobile business and consumer users, perhaps even for advanced smartphones. The first WiMAX phone is expected to be out this summer. By the time WiMAX 2 has a nationwide footprint, the technology may well be giving traditional cellular services a run for their money. The higher bandwidth capability of WiMAX 2 make it a natural for high definition video and perhaps the long awaited Internet enabled vehicle.

But WiMAX also has the potential to serve millions of users not wired for DSL or Cable broadband and loath to accept the high latencies and limited bandwidth of satellite Internet services. That makes it a natural to be the service of choice in rural areas, perhaps with deployment accelerated by the current stimulus funding available for rural broadband. WiMAX 2 speeds will get the attention of both consumers and business users dissatisfied with their current broadband services and looking for something competitive that doesn’t require construction costs. WiMAX to the desktop is reality now, even in areas heavily dominated by DSL and Cable broadband services.

Less conspicuous will be wireless backhaul applications for WiFI hotspots, 3G cellular and even other 4G technologies. To get beyond today’s bandwidth limited cell sites means either fiber optic or high speed wireless backhaul. WiMAX was always intended for this application, although consumer and business Internet services are what’s being talked up in the media.