Who Still Needs a T1?

With all the hoopla over copper and fiber Ethernet, plus new options in Cable broadband, that stalwart of business connectivity, the T1 line, is getting little fanfare these days. Does that mean that T1 is on its last legs? Or, is there a future for this proven telecom service?

Far from fading out, T1 is as popular as ever. New installations are being provisioned as you read this. The fact that T1 has been around for decades is one of its strongest features. That and the decline of T1 prices in tandem with competing Ethernet over Copper services are keeping T1 in the game.

So, who really needs T1? You do if you need professional grade dedicated bandwidth, secure point to point connections, or robust telephone trunking. That’s especially true if your business location is a bit off the beaten track. If you can’t get any wireline service other than plain old telephone, you probably can get a T1 line installed.

T1 has almost universal connectivity today. To understand how that can be when DSL and Cable rarely go past the city limits and Ethernet services are mostly found in business districts, we have to look back at why T1 was developed in the first place. We think of T1 lines as wide area network connections today, but in the beginning T1 was a telephone trunking system.

Prior to WWII, telephone companies connected to each other through analog lines on telephone poles or underground cables. Carrier telephony used a frequency division multiplexing scheme to load multiple conversations onto a single pair. In the 1950’s, Bell Labs developed digital multiplexing to replace the analog systems. The basic digital trunk was defined in the T-Carrier specifications. T-Carrier includes T1 and T3 lines.

The genius behind the design of T1 is that it runs on two pair of ordinary twisted pair copper. This is the subscriber loop connection that is installed in every business for telephone service. The wires are the same, but the signals on a T1 line are digital, not analog. While one copper pair can carry one business phone line, two copper pair can carry 24 phone lines or a digital bandwidth connection of 1.5 Mbps.

Another smart thing about the design of T1 is that provisions were made to boost the signal so that it can connect far flung locations. Not every business location is within a few thousand feet of a telco central office. Even analog signals fade out with distance. The much higher digital signal frequencies fade out much quicker. That’s why DSL is hard to come by. Unless you are close to the phone company CO, the DSL signal has little bandwidth capability left by the time it gets to your place.

The T1 support system was designed with a device called a regenerative repeater that can be installed in the line every mile or so to complete regenerate the signal. The noisy and faded input signal is boosted and reshaped so that at the output it looks like what comes out of the central office. Keep adding these repeaters and you can extend T1 service far out into the countryside.

If you have a business on the edge of town or in a remote location, you may still be able to get a T1 line for a reasonable price. The only real competition is two way satellite broadband. It works, but has very long latency times that make telephone service perform poorly, is subject to rain and snow outages, and has download limitations. If you exceed your quota, your speed will be reduced so that you don’t hog the limited resources of the satellite.

T1 has none of those problems. You get a rock solid 1.5 Mbps in both the upload and download direction. Load it full up with data transfers 24/7 or use what you need, the price is the same. Latency is negligible for most applications. In fact, T1 works great as a multi-telephone service or in the ISDN PRI configuration that supports most PBX telephone systems. You don’t have to get an Internet only data connections. T1 lines can be ordered between two business locations for a private line connection.

Is T1 the right service for your needs? Check T1 prices and availability instantly and compare with other options... if there are any that are suitable.

Dedicated Bandwidth vs Cable

There are a couple of good but quite different approaches to business Internet connectivity. One is dedicated bandwidth, as exemplified by T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper. The other is Cable broadband. Let’s take a look at what each has to offer and how you would pick the right service for your business.

Small and medium size businesses that pick dedicated bandwidth services do so either because there is no shared bandwidth service readily available or because they value the consistency and service level agreements provided by the dedicated telecom providers. Companies that choose Cable broadband do so because they get a lot of bandwidth for a relatively small price. Cable BB is an established service that has been proven in years of service to residential and business users. The service availability is generally quite good, especially during business hours, and the low prices may be more important than service guarantees.

It’s important to note the definition of the term “dedicated” in this context. It doesn’t mean working extra hard like, say, a dedicated employee. What dedicated means is that a certain amount of bandwidth is reserved or dedicated to your exclusive use. If you order a T1 line, you can count on having 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download capability available at all times. There is no such thing as overage charges or fair use policies. You can load that T1 line up to the limit and run it that way all month. You’ll be charged the same as if you lightly used the service during business hours and let it idle overnight.

Cable broadband is sold on a different basis. First of all, the bandwidth is shared not dedicated. You’ll notice that Cable bandwidth is specified as “up to” 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and so on. At any given moment you may experience the full bandwidth or a small fraction of it. Why? It’s the sharing involved. What Cable companies do is lease large dedicated bandwidth circuits and then divvy that bandwidth up among their subscribers. The chunk allocated to your area may be shared by dozens or hundreds of other users. Whether or not that makes a difference depends on what you are doing on the Internet and what others on the same service are doing.

Cable broadband is designed to match the expected activities of the typical Internet user. You know that when you are looking something up online, you first query a search engine. Then you read through the first page or two of listings deciding on what site to visit. Finally, you select a site and it downloads in your browser. You may quickly go to visit another page on that site or you may spend a minute or two reading what’s on the screen.

Notice that what you were doing was sending out commands from your keyboard, waiting for a page download and then not accessing the Internet at all while you perused the material. That’s why shared bandwidth works. Not everyone is going to be typing on their keyboard or in the midst of a file download simultaneously. While you are reading, someone else can be downloading and vice versa.

This is also the reason why asymmetrical bandwidth works so well for Internet access. Asymmetrical means that upload and download speeds are vastly different. You may order 30 Mbps download with 3 Mbps or 6 Mbps upload and be perfectly satisfied. It only takes a small amount of data from the keyboard to trigger much larger data packages in the form of websites or videos to download.

Dedicated bandwidth services like T1, DS3, EoC, EoF and SONET fiber optic tend to be symmetrical. The upload and download speeds are the same. This is particularly valuable if you are communicating between organizations, sending files back and forth, uploading to a remote server or backing up files. In these cases, upload capacity counts.

The other service that works much better over dedicated rather than shared bandwidth is VoIP telephony. In fact, you are much better off connecting directly to your VoIP service provider with a dedicated T1 line or SIP trunk than using the Internet at all. The Internet offers no class of service controls so your sensitive voice packets can easily get pushed around by someone else’s data packets. That situation is even worse on shared bandwidth access services where your bandwidth varies all over the place.

Is your business in need of Internet access, point to point connections or multi-location connectivity? Check prices on dedicated and shared bandwidth options and get complementary expert advice on what services make the most sense for your business requirements.

Multi-Carrier WAN MPLS Solution

Businesses that want to link their many far-flung locations have had several options available. They could set up their own private point to point lines, go with a Frame Relay network or sign up for MPLS network service. Which of these offers the best cost solution? Let’s have a look.

When companies and small and growing, the temptation is to grow the network along with the company. If there are only two locations, the logical move is to order a point to point T1 line or higher bandwidth service. This directly connects the new locations with dedicated private bandwidth. When another location is set up, add another private line back to headquarters. If you want the two remote locations to talk directly, you can add a third private line between them.

You can see how costs grow rather quickly when you try to create a mesh network using dedicated private lines. Pretty soon you have a rats nest of connections and a soaring telecom bill. What happens then is someone in IT decides that it makes more sense to have only one private line to each location and arrange them in a star network with headquarters at the center. The headquarters router will take care of directing traffic among all locations. This is better, but you are still paying more than necessary.

That conundrum is what led to the development of Frame Relay networks. The idea is that a shared WAN network is more cost effective than every company creating its own private WAN. The Frame Relay network is one of the original clouds. You simply connected to the network from each of your locations and long haul traffic was routed through the cloud. If a cloud is running correctly, you have no sense that there is other traffic on the network while you are using it.

MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching takes the concept of Frame Relay and improves upon it. Frame Relay networks reached the height of their popularity in an era where bandwidth demands were generally lower and most traffic was data packets. MPLS is designed around fiber optic core networks with a regional or nationwide footprint. There are class of service tags included in the labels that encapsulate the user packets. These ensure that time sensitive applications like VoIP telephony or video conferencing get the special treatment they need to work successfully. As the name implies, MPLS can transport any protocol. Multiple customers can transport different protocols simultaneously and they won’t interfere.

Since MPLS networks can handle any protocol, have enormous bandwidth at their disposal and have inherent security because of the proprietary nature of the network technology, doesn’t it make perfect sense to connect to an MPLS network to link business locations?

Yes it does. Your best cost solution for a given performance level across more than two locations is likely to be an MPLS network solution. The one fly in the ointment is that any given MPLS network doesn’t necessarily go everywhere you want it to. You may be able to connect some of your locations to the network but not others. There are some massive MPLS networks that can connect nearly everywhere, but they can also command top dollar. Is there a better solution?

The approach that can give you the connectivity you need with at the best pricing is a multi-carrier or meshed MPLS network. It’s a network of networks. In other words, several MPLS networks are joined to cover all of your business locations at the best price point for each.

Where do you find this type of service? Obviously, contacting any particular carrier will only get you access to their MPLS network. If you want to interconnect them, you have the tricky issue of network to network interfacing. That’s a job better left to telecom network specialists. One company, AireSpring, has the expertise to make this happen and the carrier relationships to gain access.

Does your company need to interconnect multiple business locations? Telecom broker Telarus has access to the best rates on MPLS networks, including Meshed MPLS from AireSpring. Get availability and pricing for MPLS solutions. You are probably spending too much right now.

Advantage of Dedicated Cloud Connections

The capital investment and staff cost savings offered by cloud services are encouraging small, medium and large companies alike to move their telephone and IT resources to the cloud. It’s been assumed that a simple broadband Internet connection will suffice for access. That’s turning out to be a disappointment in some cases.

The notion that bandwidth is bandwidth is how we get in trouble specifying metro and wide area network connections. What makes the Internet attractive as a WAN service is that it is almost universally available and the cost is spread over millions, even billions of users. Savvy companies discovered long ago that you could get around the security issues by encrypting your data to create a VPN or Virtual Private Network. The VPN gives you a private tunnel through a public network.

VPNs work great to support remote workers and traveling employees who’s only way to connect with corporate headquarters is through a wired or wireless Internet service. They’re also good for linking multiple business locations, such as branch offices or franchises. With a VPN you can transfer sensitive financial and inventory files among dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations.

Note that we are talking about file transfers. The TCP/IP network protocol was made for this application. All you do is launch the transfer and TCP will ensure that all the packets that make up the file will get from point A to point B intact. If something goes awry and a packet is corrupted, it is automatically resent.

Remember that the Internet was designed for universal access and to be self-healing in the face of equipment failure or line breaks. While TCP/IP is making sure that files are being accurately transfered, the Internet itself is making sure that there is a path available from point A to point B no matter what. While you can expect to transfer data, voice or video files over the Internet, you can’t really expect that this is going to happen without hiccups or in any minimal amount of time. Packets may or may not be lost and require a resend. The path may change from packet to packet. The latency or time delay from source to destination can vary all over the place, or jitter.

The result of this is that real time performance of Internet connections is highly variable. This is no big deal for data file transfers. The time to transfer may vary by milliseconds or seconds for each file. Time sensitive data streams like audio and video need some extra help in the form of buffering. You compensate for unknowable transmission rate variations by filling up a buffer with packets and then clocking them out at a constant rate.

Buffering works great for one-way downloads, but creates havoc for real-time video or audio streams. That includes telephone calls and video conferencing. You can’t have much of a buffer or the latency increases to the point where you can’t talk and listen at the same time. There is a noticeable delay, fractions of a second or longer, that make two-way communication painful at best. Lost packets from iffy Internet connections add distortion that blurs your video and garbles your audio.

The same Internet that seems fast and responsive when searching for information on Google can be maddening when trying to calm down an angry customer on a VoIP phone call that is breaking up. Automated business processes that worked fine over the LAN when the data center was in-house all of a sudden become sluggish in the cloud. It’s not that the cloud isn’t just as good or better than local resources, it’s that you need a better connection.

What you want is a dedicated connection between you and your cloud provider. Level 3 Communications is now offering dedicated connections to Amazon Web Services (AWS) running in Equinix data centers to meet the demand from larger corporations. Dedicated connections include Ethernet Private Line, Ethernet MPLS and Wavelength services. T1 lines are also suitable for smaller companies, although Ethernet over Copper may be a lower cost option and offer more bandwidth for the money.

A dedicated connection ensures that you have steady guaranteed bandwidth plus low latency, jitter and packet loss. Security is also improved because access is limited, not publicly available. A well engineered dedicated connection is just like a very long LAN that includes your locations and your service provider.

Are you disappointed with the performance of your cloud services or concerned that quality will suffer if you move from a local data center to the cloud? All you may need to get things working to your satisfaction is a high quality dedicated cloud connection. Why put up with all that aggravation when dedicated connection prices are lower than they’ve ever been? Check prices and availability of dedicated cloud connection bandwidth you need to support your critical applications.

Cable, T1 and EoC

Today, there are three excellent broadband options for the small to medium size business. They cost roughly the same, but offer different options. Which do you choose? Let’s take a closer look at business-class Cable, T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper.

We’ll start with T1 lines because they are the mainstay of SMB connectivity. T1 lines come in several flavors depending on what you want to do with them. They’re all based on the same technology developed by the telephone industry half a century ago.

T1 is a T-carrier technology based on transmitting digital signals over ordinary twisted pair copper wiring. It takes two copper pair to make one T1 line. One pair is used for upload, the other for download. When used for telephony, one pair is talk and the other is listen. The speed of the digital signal on the line is 1.5 Mbps. This doesn’t vary. The equipment at each end of the line is synchronized to maintain a steady bit rate regardless of whether anything is being transmitted or not.

Originally, the purpose of this arrangement was to transmit telephone calls in channels called DS0s. There are 24 channels on a T1 line. You can use them separately or combine all the channels to make one large broadband pipe. The most common T1 telephone line now is called a T1 PRI or ISDN PRI. It has 23 separate phone lines plus one channel for signaling and Caller ID.

A broadband T1 line delivers a fully symmetrical bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. The upload and download speeds are the same. This line can connect directly between two business locations as a private line or it can be used to connect to the Internet or another network, such as a MPLS cloud network. When used as an Internet connection, the arrangement is called a dedicated T1 Internet connection. Dedicated means that the full bandwidth is always available for your use only.

The most direct competitor to T1 is now Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Ethernet over Copper uses the same twisted pair telephone wiring that T1 lines use. The main difference is that the equipment on each end uses a more advanced technology to transport higher bandwidth through each copper pair. Often multiple pair in the same binder cable are used to bring in a higher bandwidth EoC service.

Ethernet over Copper is available is bandwidths from 1 Mbps on up to typically 20 Mbps. In some areas, it is now possible to get speeds as high as 90 or 100 Mbps delivered over copper pair. Those are bandwidth levels that have demanded fiber optic connections until recently. EoC is also designed to be highly scalable. You order and EoC port at the speed you ultimately expect to need but only sign up for the speed you need now. In the future, you can have that speed raised by simply calling your service provider and the change will be made in days or even hours.

A comparable service priced the same as a T1 line is 2x2 Mbps Ethernet or 3x3 Mbps Ethernet. Those designations mean that you get the same speed for upload and download, just like with a T1 line. Note that the bandwidth is as much as twice as high, however.

The third option is business class Cable broadband. This service is offered by Cable TV companies, such as Comcast, that also provide consumer broadband. The coaxial cables used for Cable TV have tremendous bandwidth capacity and can easily transport broadband as well as television signals. You connect via a Cable modem. The latest Cable modem standard is DOCSIS 3.0 that can deliver 50 or 100 Mbps to business users.

It may seem amazing that you can get 50 or 100 Mbps for the same price as a 1.5 Mbps T1 line, but there are some differences in the services. Cable bandwidth is shared, not dedicated. You’ll find that your bandwidth varies during the day depending on how heavily other users are uploading and downloading. Also, Cable bandwidth is not symmetrical. You may be getting 100 Mbps in the download direction, but your upload path will be only 10 or 15 Mbps. That may not matter if you are primarily accessing Web pages or watching video clips. It could be a problem if you expect to be transmitting video service or uploading very large files frequently.

Cable does have one extra advantage in that you can get what’s called a “triple play” service. That’s broadband, telephone and television all on the same cable for one bundled price. This is especially attractive to businesses that have waiting rooms for the public, like doctor’s offices or auto service facilities. There are special bundle prices for public businesses like bars and restaurants.

Which bandwidth solution is best for your business? Why not get prices and availability for Cable broadband, T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper for your business location? Then pick the solution that makes the most sense for your applications.



Note: Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Broadband Business Internet Service Options

Nearly every business today is connected to the Internet or soon will be. Even those mom and pop operations that still use the mechanical credit card machines will soon use electronic card verification, email and at least a brochure website. Businesses that are already seasoned users of the Web are looking to upgrade their bandwidth to support a move to cloud services. Let’s compare and contrast the various options you have for a broadband Internet connection.

Business Internet broadband services generally fall into two categories. They are shared and dedicated connections. Shared connections are similar in design to residential broadband services. The fact that the bandwidth is divvied up among many users lowers the cost for all. Dedicated services allocate a certain bandwidth to your connection and it does not vary regardless of what other users are doing. These services also tend to come with SLAs or Service Level Agreements that spell out technical parameters and availability commitments.

Shared bandwidth services include Cable Broadband, DSL, 3G and 4G Wireless, and two-way Satellite Internet. What they all have in common is that the actual bandwidth you’ll see varies with the number of other users and what they are doing. These services are sold as speeds “up to” a certain number of Mbps. That means what it says. You may get the full speed the connection is capable of or you may get a tenth of that at any given time.

These variations may or may not bother you. If you are running enterprise VoIP or bandwidth sensitive business processes, your variable connection may not support the performance you have in mind. On the other hand, if you use the Internet at work the same way you use it at home for email, Web browsing, or accessing pre-recorded audio and video, you may be quite satisfied with the service and delighted with the cost savings. Some services, like 3G wireless and Satellite are often used to support electronic credit card machines in lieu of using a phone line.

Dedicated Internet access connections, such as T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper, have rock solid bandwidth and generally excellent latency, jitter and packet loss characteristics. These are the same lines that you would use to interconnect business connections on a private line service. As Internet connections, they have one termination at your location and the other at your Internet service providers location.

Dedicated Internet access supports Web and email servers. The also support multiple users accessing the Internet and VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). If you are going to stream content to Internet users, you’ll want a DIA (Dedicated Internet Access) connection from the server to the Internet.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) has become very popular as both a private line and DIA connection. You can often get twice the bandwidth you could with a T1 line costing the same price. Like T1, EoC is provisioned over twisted pair copper telco wiring to keep construction costs down.

Larger companies and those with demanding applications such as video transport move up to fiber optic services, such as OC3 to OC768 SONET and Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1 Gbps GigE and 10 Gbps 10GigE bandwidth services. All of these are dedicated services with service level agreements.

How do you decide which broadband service is right for your business? Perhaps the best way is to compare prices, availability and features for the range of Broadband Business Internet Service options available for your location. Most business grade broadband services are available only for business locations and not residences, despite similarities with consumer Internet services.

Ethernet Over Copper Vs T1

The standard business bandwidth connection is the versatile T1 line. These connections are available just about everywhere, they offer a dedicated and reliable bandwidth and prices have been getting lower over the years. It’s hard to go wrong with a T1 line, but there’s another service that is gaining popularity that you should also consider. That’s EoC or Ethernet over Copper.

EoC is an Ethernet WAN connection that can link multiple business locations or give you a high speed dedicated Ethernet connection. It also makes a good on-ramp to private cloud networks such as nationwide or international MPLS networks.

What Ethernet over Copper and T1 lines have in common is that they are both provisioned over multiple twisted pair telco wiring. That’s what’s in the bundle of telephone wiring that’s connected to your business now. Both T1 and EoC can use multiple wire pairs to increase bandwidth in a process known as bonding.

There are technology differences in the protocols and modulation schemes that are used to transport the signal between your business location and the closest carrier office, but you generally don't need to be concerned about that level of detail. Both technologies can transport your packets quickly and reliably. What you need to really compare is how much bandwidth you can get for a particular price level.

Where available, EoC often offers both higher bandwidths and lower prices. Part of that is due to the efficiency of the technology involved in transmitting higher bandwidths over common copper wiring. The other factor reducing prices is that EoC is often promoted by competitive carriers looking to establish a foothold or even dominance in a particular market.

What sort of bandwidths are available? T1 lines offer a rock solid 1.5 Mbps per line. Each additional line bonded-in increases that by 1.5 Mbps, so a double bonded solution is 3 Mbps. Bonding is practical up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. Above that, other solutions such as DS3 are often more cost effective.

Ethernet offers a wide variety of bandwidth options, including low speeds of around 1 Mbps, the standard 10 Mbps Ethernet that is also the basic Ethernet LAN speed, and other steps up to around 45 Mbps. That seems to give EoC a bandwidth advantage, but there’s a rub. Ethernet over Copper has distance limitations. You need to be within a few miles of a carrier point of presence to get this service. T1 and bonded T1 does not have these limitations.

If you are located in a small town, rural area or are otherwise not eligible for EoC service, there is another option rapidly becoming available called EoDS1 or Ethernet over DS1. This uses the data specification for T1 lines, called DS1, to transport Ethernet. In effect, this is Ethernet delivered over a T1 line using special interface equipment at both ends.

So what’s best service to order? The answer depends a lot on where you are located. Why not get a set of competitive quotes for your business location so you can make an informed decision? Take just a second to put in a request for Ethernet over Copper vs T1 Pricing and Availability. A friendly Telarus consultant will be happy to review the options with you and make recommendations for your particular situation. Sorry, no residential service available.