Why Are T1 Lines Still Expensive? 556
badfrog asks: "Over the last 10 years, DSL and cable modem has upped its speed (although in some instances only slightly) and dropped its price. However, the price of a T1 has stayed almost exactly the same. If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have predicted any geek that wanted to would have fiber or their own T1 line to the house by now. What is with this sad state of affairs that a 'business class' 1.544Mbit connection is hundreds of dollars more than a 6Mbit cable connection? Is it a legitimate case that a high upload rate should increase cost so significantly?"
Oh, come on! (Score:5, Informative)
Why do you even ask this question?
The difference is clear. A T1 guarantees you your bandwidth. Both DSL and Cable do not. You usually get it, but that is only because others only use a fraction of what they are "allowed" to. Look in your TOS, you'll see that they do not guarantee the speeds, they are "averages". So essentialy, your ISP pays for 100Mbps and sells 5000Mbps to 1000 customers (Each 5Mbps, but in reality they get only 0.1Mbps). (Numbers pulled out of my you know what). If everyone would start downloading like crazy at the same time you'd get congestions. The fact is that it's not the bandwith that is interesting with DSL/Cable but the fact that it is always-on.
When DSL started here, it was only 256kbps/64kbps for quite a lot of money. We made the calculation compared to our average ISDN Internet usage (that was per minute) and the price would be the same or slightly higher. Sure, the higher speed was appealing, but the fact that we knew we payed a flat-fee for unlimited interet usage and always-on made it more attractive. That was why we were early adopters, not because it was faster. After all the ISDN 64kbps was plenty of fast back then. It did change our internet habits though: checking the email in business hours was a no-no. We started to check our mail after waking up ;-)
I heared that in Italy you can get a T1 for cheap, but I'm sure it comes with no guarantee.
It's not the speed (Score:5, Informative)
With a cable modem or ADSL line you'll have no SLA. It'll be "if it breaks, we'll fix it when we get around to it, possibly within three working days". With a T1 or similar line you'll get a service level agreement for a guaranteed rapid fix. If you get DOSsed, you won't just get thrown off the service, they'll work with you to stop the DOS attack etc.
Also, contention - with ADSL or cable you'll be sharing that bandwidth with perhaps as many as 50 other users. A T1 will be uncontended.
It's also expected that T1 users will be heavy bandwidth users, which is reflected in the price.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Informative)
As far as the prices, one reason is that a T1 requres more phone circuits whereas DSL only uses 1. Each circuit gets charged taxes and surcharges, so it is no surprise the cost hasn't come down quite as much.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Informative)
Guaranteed transport security (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:2, Informative)
Sort of. The ISP serving the T1 might guarantee it, but they don't have to. However, the company leasing you the T1 line (usually the phone company) guarantees that the line will be available to something crazy like 7 nines. The difference being that one guarantees the line will be there, the other just guarantees that *if* the line is working, it'll work up to capacity (which could be reduced if the line is faulty).
Considering that my DSL goes out every other week for some stupid reason (Good old Bell Canada, why just screw over Sympatico customers, when you can screw over everyone with DSL by not upgrading the COs so they can handle all those line cards! I just love 10 minute LCP response waits...) I can see why something like "ALWAYS AVAILABLE" is very important to an ISP.
An ISP could probably survive on half the bandwidth (I *know* they could) for a few hours in the case of issues, but without any at all, customers get angry, FAST.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:2, Informative)
True, but contrary to most nations this is split in my country. I pay a fixed fee for the "connection" to the local P&T company, and then on top of that I pay a "internet connection" fee to my ISP...
Sad, but true.... I'm aware this is different in many countries, but not in mine.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Dedication (Score:5, Informative)
However, it's a dedicated connection from us to them. It's not a shared connection at any point (as most cable modem and wireless networks, and some weird DSL networks, are). Until it leaves my network entirely, I do my darnedest to ensure their traffic gets high priority within my network (with QOS and other similar voodoo). There's a dedicated router here, just for them, with a spare ready to be swapped over in about five minutes if the hardware should fail. (Cisco 2500s are down to about twenty bucks on eBay, why NOT have spares?)
As an aside, every T1 comes with my cell number, which means you get pretty much the best service I'm able to provide. Because I really don't want to be bugged after hours.
It's not the upload capacity, at least for my customers; they follow normal "small-business" traffic patterns where uploads are about 10% or so of their traffic.
Maybe some of it is just the novelty/prestige of saying "I have a T1," which sounds impressive because, hey, a lot of folks don't even know what that means. But most of it, I'd wager, is the fact that it's a dedicated, reliable connection (my customers' T1s have about two hours of downtime in the last four years), and sometimes that extra nine is worth it.
Faulty Premise (Score:5, Informative)
So T1s have been steadily dropping in price. The local loop charges however are moving upwards as clean copper is getting scarcer in some regions and the install of the box to take fiber and supply a T1 has to be accounted for in the local loop charges now. I have seen deals for $395 all in on the web however. And in the case of Sprint with had a committed information rate of the full T1. The CIR clause will cost a bit on your contract as well.
T1 Prices not Changing in 10 Years????? Wrong! (Score:4, Informative)
Another major problem (Score:5, Informative)
The old circuit switched digital phone shit is expensive. That's the reason we are moving to all packet switched technologies like VoIP. Much less is needed to run voice, net, video, and VPN over a single link if it is all done over IP. However DS-1 allows all that stuff, but can do it at a lower level. You can break out individual channels and use them for different things.
If that sounds like it's kinda useless, well, it is these days. It's legacy technology more or less. In 50 years, we'll probably see very little if any of it left. Everything will come over an IP connection, and the lower level will be a simply point-to-point with an ISP. However at this point, if you get DS-1, you are paying for all the other shit. Better to find another technology for the physical and datalink.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:3, Informative)
At least one company in my area requires an active basic phone service before they'll turn on DSL. That's what the rep told me, anyway...
Yes, the voice and data services use different ranges of frequencies for communication - the reason dial-up is limited to such a relatively low speed is that it only has the voice bandwidth to work with (3KHz, I think). You also need to install a filter to eliminate noise on your phone. Ideally, you only need to install one filter, but for this to be practical you need to have dedicated wiring for your DSL modem or home network.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Guaranteed transport security (Score:4, Informative)
But sadly, you don't.
Both a DSL line and a T1 are going to terminate at the same CO. No, a T1 isn't using anything other than a conditioned pair in the same cable that your DSL line is going through. The conditioning required might involve either cleaning some contacts along the way or just finding a clean pair. A long, long time ago this involved checking out amplifiers along the way and such, but that is pretty much gone in metro/suburban areas. You might find an amplifier in a far-flung rural area and that might need conditioning.
But a T1 in the middle of nowhere isn't going to be cheap, either. But it might be the best you can get if you don't have cable TV and are miles and miles past 17,000 feet from the CO.
You've been robbed. (Score:1, Informative)
Vacuum tubes are expensive because its hard to make a vacuum tube that has any degree of reliability. The fact that transistors do the same job and cost dirt has little impact on the difficulty or cost of making vacuum tubes.
So that's why just about every American house had a vacuum tube radio or three before they were obsoleted by transistors? Vacuum tubes were not expensive.
T1s are expensive for the same reason. The 15 meg FiOS service at my house actually costs Verizon a lot less to build and maintain than the multiply repeated 1.5 meg T1 that preceeded it.
A false reason and analogy is as good as any for Verizon and friends. They've already spent $200,000,000 of your money without delivering what they promissed. [muniwireless.com]
Re:Not surprising? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Informative)
Pricing is based on two government agencies:
1) FCC (Federal)
2) PUC (Local)
Also please keep in mind that cable and dsl do not guarantee speeds from that connection. In addition; T1's speeds are symmetrical while dsl and cable are asymmetrical; hence the difference in uploading and downloading. One final thought is quality of service; there is are strict SLA's in place for T1's; while cable and dsl get pretty much get away with varying types of service.
If you want a cheaper T1; look at PUC pricing instead of FCC pricing. Talk to your provider about UNE types of service.
PS: UNE = Unbundled Network Element.
Regards
Not sure where you buy them, but they're cheap now (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, DSL is cheaper, but you get what you pay for to a certain point. Most importantly, ADSL is typically restricted to 768k max upload speed (I can get commercial cable Internet with 1.1 upload around here) unless you get SDSL (much pricier), and then you basically have a T1 without the service guarantees.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Informative)
Once you get the T to your ISP you have to pay them to fill the pipe. This can be any amount you are willing to pay for, both upstream and downstream, up to the limit of the line.
Upstream is the killer though. I run my own web server and mailserver etc so I need upstream, and I pay dearly for it. I have a "business class" DSL line that is 936/1536, compared to the consumer grade 256/1536. For that I pay over three times the cost per month. If they offered 2mbit upstream for more I would probably get it but they don't offer it here. I suspect the upstream is expensive because it is a much more limited resource. To save costs, service providers probably buy only so much upstream and so much downstream. Typical users use what, 92% down and 8% up. Me it's almost the other way around. Because of that they lease say 2000 units of downstream and 250 units of upstream from their provider. If everyone fires up bittorrent etc on their network it kills their upstream and that 250 goes real fast and their customers complain. So they either have to pay for a fatter upstream, or charge more and start capping. Obviously they cap. They go from 95% of their customers being unhappy (slow, long ping times, timeouts) to 5% of their customers being unhappy. (upstream sucks, try emailing mom your new home movie!) Obviously they choose to upset 5% rather than 95%.
I heared that in Italy you can get a T1 for cheap, but I'm sure it comes with no guarantee.
well, the T is guaranteed. If you get a 24 (26?) channel digital line you are gonna get 1536 up and down, period. Now what's on the other end of that line, that could be anything. If your ISP has not overbooked its bandwidth and has a sane network arrangement, you can expect 1450 or so both ways in most cases, downloads topping out around 1520'ish. I have not had the displeasure of using an ISP that overbooks yet, but they're out there, I'm sure of it. In that case you might get lower speeds up, down, or both - hard to say. I have never heard an ISP guarantee anything though. If they did, the next flashmob that occurred on CNN with half the country downloading video of the latest terrorist attack, sure enough everyone's download would suck at once and their phone would be ringing demanding a comp'd week of service or something. So I guess you can't blame them for not being able to handle flashmobs.
Checking my line now,
Connection Status: Speed (down/up): 1536 / 992 Kbps
mmm 992 that's faster than last I looked. It's gone up slowly over the last several months, no idea why but I'm not complaining. Rather surprised to see I am only sending about 2x as many packets as I am receiving. But I'm sure the send packets are quite a bit larger than the received ones.
None of this explains the cost of the functional digital line. I believe
Re:USE GOOGLE... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Informative)
That's not entirely true. I worked as a WAN manager for a while and maintained our WAN links (as the title would suggest
Also, with the ISP's over-subscribing the T1s: those are called shared or fractional T1s. If you're paying for a full T1, then you are getting all 24 channels (or 30 if it's an E1).
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:2, Informative)
T1's are not internet-only. Traditional[and modern] T1 line usage is for TELEPHONE traffic. A T1 provides a set ammount of sub-lines, some or all of which can be set to send and receive internet traffic, or serve as phone lines. Most businesses with several phone lines(not just 4 or 5, with a pbx system - but 15 or more) still use a T1 or T# setup, depending on their needs. If the business also needs internet access, they just tell the telco they would like X of their T1 dedicated to internet access.
Hope this helps. In the business world, the word T1 does not bring "internet" to mind before "phone lines".
Actually, it's both... (Score:3, Informative)
It's also common to have a good SLA WRT uptime and response time for incidents.
This company originally had a T1 through Alternet/UUnet. If we rebooted the router, they called to check on us. There were times they called to check on things when we weren't even aware we'd had a glitch. They got bought. As far as I could tell, nothing changed. Then they merged or got bought again. If it changed, it sure wasn't much. They were still pricy, but well worth it. Then they got bought/merged/whatever the last time. And suddenly it was all quite random. We could be down an hour and might not get a call. (Until this last merger we'd never been down more than a couple of minutes, and those were precious few.) If we called about something, it was 50/50 whether we'd get a helpful, knowledgeable tech or someone either clueless or who just didn't care. Numerous emails and calls to our sales rep were not returned over a several week period.
So we switched to CoreNAP (local to Austin). Cheaper, and the class of service we were used to. fast responses. Savvy techs. Sales reps who cared. Life is good again.
We did eventually hear from a new sales rep at our former T1 provider, but it was too late. he was quite helpful in shutting down the old account, as was their support group, so maybe the escalated email informing them we were switching providers got someone's attention. I wish them well; it's depressing to see one of the best rotting away.
Meanwhile, we have two bonded T1s here. 3Mb/sec. We have about 90 people here using this, with 10 people remote. In the evening, we might have 20-30 engineers remotely working through those measly two T1s. And I still see better performance than I do at home with 4.5Mb/sec cable modem in the daytime, much less evenings and weekends.
So it's both real world performance and real world support.
Re:Full Duplex (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You've been robbed. (Score:1, Informative)
Keyword: *a* vacuum tube radio. One. Just one.
I would hedge my bets that my house presently has a dozen radios in it.
In 1930 [thepeoplehistory.com], a cheap radio would cost $9.95. Calculating for inflation, that radio would cost $122 today.
In contrast, eBay sells 10 radios [ebay.com] for $0.99.
Yes, tubes were expensive back then. That radio only had 5 tubes in it. Considering for the price of the case, I'd say that's about $10 a tube. Which is what they are now, give or take.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:3, Informative)
You have to have a micro-filter on each of the extension sockets from the main phone line you want to put phone / data equipment on. There will be cross talk, line drops, radiation leaks and general carnage if you don't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_filter [wikipedia.org] makes slightly more sense out of it. If you have a master socket in your house with a hard wired (i.e. in the back of the box) extension you will nee a micro filter at all extension sockets you are going to use. If you have a master socket in your house with a removable (i.e. a cable fits into the master socket and provides two sockets of it's own) extension then you might be able to just have a micro-filter between your master socket and your extension system. This later scenario will require the *DSL equipment to only be connected to the micro-filter in the master socket. You can't have the master socket in the hall with an extension in the lounge, in the kitchen, in the front bedroom, in the back bedroom and expect to have a single filter in the hall but the *DSL kit connected in the back bedroom. you would need 4 micro-filters in that case.
Re:Absolute BS. (Score:2, Informative)
Reliability (Score:2, Informative)
The service is great too. After this last storm (no phones for 40 hours), we got dial tone and T1 back long before we got long distance calling back, and even before we got electricity back. This is in addition to the ISP monitoring the line and calling me when something happens to it.
(and for the record, mine is the four-wire true T1 type, which bonds locally to a channel on a T3 the ISP owns, for transport to their main office)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Informative)
Contrary to popular belief, T-1s are not oversubscribed. A T-1 is guaranteed bandwidth. As well, you're not really paying much for the bandwidth itself, you're paying for the Service Level Agreement (SLA). What that means is that if your circuit goes down, someone's head usually rolls. In other words, you get a reimbursement for your down time, or at least someone who tries to get you back running as soon as possible. As for your DSL/Cable, it really doesn't matter if you're God, you're down for as long as they feel like ignoring your problem.
T-1s also do not require more "phone circuits" (whatever those are), rather simply a second pair. This does not affect the price, however, it does affect availability. Taxes and surcharges are not on a "per line" basis, but on a "per service" basis. If you're using your T-1 for digital phone, you do pay extra taxes and fees for each active channel. This doesn't really affect IP stuff, since all your channels are bonded in order to provide you your total bandwidth.
All in all, the difference really boils down to the fact that one is a "business class" service, and one is not, businesses can justify more expense for their IP service if it makes them money, and therefore, providers figure that they can make more money off it, so they charge more.
Re:Why are vacuum tubes expensive? (Score:1, Informative)
Also I have to say, I had 5/2 FIOS, which got upgraded to 10/2, because I was an old DSL subscriber yada.. yada.. yada.. .
Then they wanted all my phone service (for two lines) and I said yes so they threw in 20/5 FIOS as a bonus. All it took was a provisioning command. Did it increase the amount of traffic that they actually carry each month? No. Did it increase their cost of business at all? Probably not. Do my down loads scream? Absolutely. Do photo uploads to the print service go faster? You bet. Would I trade it all for a T1? No thanks.
As a previous poster stated, T1 had a purpose back in circuit switched days, and that purpose has pretty well run its course. Packet networks need packet carriers.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Informative)
Such technology has been popular for about a decade. Copper is expensive realestate. And only so many T1's can be on the same trunk before crosstalk starts screwing up POTS and the other T1's.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:3, Informative)
The extension the DSL equipment connects to requires no filter. They filter out the frequencies used for DSL, on a voice line those frequencies only provide static, but the DSL extension certainly needs access to the frequency range it operates on!
You are correct that every extension that will use the voice frequencies needs to be filtered. You can filter that at one point and run all your voice extensions from that point so that filtering will have been applied to all of them or you can use multiple filters at the end point. Either way, you have to run one unfiltered extension.
No telecomm geeks on hand? That's disappointing. (Score:5, Informative)
Meanwhile, the equipment that phone companies use for T1 lines is, as someone said, expensive. It's also on a 30-year depreciation cycle. Until that cycle is up, don't expect prices to come down much. Some companies, like MCI, have already gone through a bankruptcy and written off a big chunk of that depreciation, so they might be able to do better, but only if they own the gear they're using. Any telco buying capacity from a baby Bell is going to have to pay (and charge you) the going rate.
Which brings me to the biggest reason for high T1 costs. The price is regulated. T1 lines get billed based on tariff schedules maintained by each state's public utilities commission. That way, small telcos (competitive local exchange carriers, to use the technical term) can theoretically compete with the big guys by selling you comparable service at a comparable price, often by reselling services actually being provided by the baby Bell, with them simply acting as a middle-man.
For the most part, the price isn't the result of supply and demand, or bandwidth guarantees, or idiots who pay more than they should. It's the result of lobbying by the telco industry. And, being regulated by the government, the price is unlikely to ever go down much. The only real competitive pressure on price is coming from MCI and other telcos that are able to give you a heftier discount because of owning their own infrastructure and having a lower cost burden. The tariff schedules are the same for every T1 within any given geography, regardless of who sells it to you, but some telcos can offer bigger discounts off of the tariffed rate if they have lower overhead costs. The effect of that lower cost structure is most noticeable in "lit" buildings, where telcos have large, SONET multiplexer units inside office buildings aggregating all of the data and voice traffic onto fiber and ensuring it stays on their own network rather than a competitor's. In those locations, the equipment is new, with much more capacity at a much lower cost than the gear used for buildouts in the 1990's. There also aren't any third parties involved insisting on a cut of the action.
Missing the point (Score:2, Informative)
http://serviceguide.att.com/tariff/business/ext/f
These are the prices *period* (few exceptions for special state contracts such as CALNET)
Re:T Carrier is going away (Score:4, Informative)
by type) with bandwidth dropping with distance. T1 can be run thousands of miles but at a substantial cost per mile. T1 requires expensive repeaters every 3/4 mile or so. Those repeaters are not located indoors so they have to be rated for industrial temperature range (or even military temperature grade in harsh locations). Now, that is based on traditional ways of doing things. Those repeaters need enclosures and electrical power. Theoretically, there is no reason you couldn't put repeaters on DSL lines but I think it was only in the past year or so that you could actually buy them and they are still probably rather expensive.
Normal DSL equipment, DSL modems and DSLAMs, are more of a mass market commodity item than T1 equipment. T1 equipment could be manufactured cheaply, probably
cheaper than DSL, in quantity but manufacturers and telcos are probably reluctant to make a large investment in equipment that is likely to be on its way out.
Telco's are used to amortizing equipment costs over 30 years or so. Investing in T1 equipment when you know that it probably will not be wanted for
either voice or data traffic a few years down the line doesn't have much appeal. DSL equipment probably also won't be useful for 30 years, either,
but it has more potential life than T1 equipment. Old DSL equipment may be relocated (when better options take over in the cities) to climate controlled
enclosures in rural neighborhoods that are dense enough but still far from a central office. New T1 circuits are probably reusing T1 equipment freed up when
old T1 circuits were upgraded so there isn't much of a market for mass produced T1 equipment or much of a surplus either; basically, T1 is probably a stagnant
market.
T1 prices have traditionally been compared to the cost of 24 telephone lines. And people are just used to paying more for T1.
In most places near a central office you may be better off negotiating for DSL line with a T1 level Committed Information Rate (CIR) and service level guarantees than a T1; i.e. a business class DSL. T1 makes sense in locations that are too far from the central office, particularly if it is a location where there is already T1 infrastructure, such as along a major highway that already has T1 lines (and thus enclosures in which to put repeaters) or in isolated rural business districts that have existing T1 lines. T1 may also be appropriate if you want mixed voice and data traffic and your TELCO doesn't have a VoIP based infrastructure yet.
Ethernet is not designed for exterior long haul use. Ethernet based circuits are likely to be available in districts that have SONET rings or bare fiber, and in colocation facilities and unavailable elsewhere.
Contrary to the original post, T1 circuits probably are much cheaper than they used to be in most markets. You can get a T1 line for under $400/mo in many markets.
Last time I used T1 was around ten years ago, it was $1400/mo for frame relay (i.e. less than full T1). Local loop alone was $400/mo. http://www.megapath.com/ [megapath.com] offers 384K fractional T1 for $259 and full T1 for $359. Speakeasy $400/mo for full T1. Both include a free router (used to be $1500) and no setup costs.
I probably had one of the first two DSL lines in my city, before the local telcos adopted T1. We installed a DSLAM at the office and purchased dry pairs from
the telco and used MVL which had a distance of 2 miles (1 mile to the central office and 1 mile to our homes). My boss and I got the first lines. Cost around $14,000 in equipment but the monthly cost per line was only around $15, not including the upstream T1.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Informative)
Amazingly, you managed to write that sentence, the first half of which is false, and the second half of which is exactly correct.
"Businesses can justify more expense for their IP service if it makes them money, and therefore, providers figure that they can make more money off it, so they charge more."
That's the whole story.
Some phone companies have figured out that the can actually make more money (sell more circuits) by lowering the price without increasing their costs all that much. Check out Verizon's business Fios. Half the cost of a T1, rapid downtime response, and four times the upstream bandwidth. They've been available in the town I live & work in for just over a year, and they've already installed more than four times the number of them than they had T1s before. Many businesses upgraded from (much cheaper) business DSL, and the cost is now in the range justifiable for a home office. When a tree hits the lines they've got to splice all the wires anyway, so maintenance of the system as a whole is a fixed expense, and the fiber is more reliable than the copper was. The only variable cost is bandwidth.
Re:xo (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=xo
No kidding! (Score:2, Informative)
100Mbs down
100Mbs up
Sure it's 'best effort' once it gets to the ISP, but when I've tested it I've gotten over 95Mbps, That's when I can get my home network moving as quickly as that (old computers, wireless cause bottlenecks)
Living in Tokyo sure has its advantages.
You mention South Korea as it it's some bumfuck backwards country, That may be the impression many people have, but South Korea is highly technologically advanced. See Samsung, LG, Hyundai etc. In fact South Korea has the highest number of broadband connections per capita in the world. They were only 5th in the world to hit the 30 million internet user mark, but koreans were surfing 2Mbps connections when most of Japan's 30 million 'internet users' had little more than iMode.
difficulty in providing T1 (Score:5, Informative)
T1s do an amazing job, they are rock solid, and work at distances that DSL simply can't, they have guaranteed bandwidth and service level agreements that involve penalties to the telco if they go down. For companies that truly NEED that connection they're irreplaceable.
All that said, for an awful lot of businesses our DSL packages at 4meg down and 1 meg up are plenty, and a fraction of the cost.
Now for the reasoning, T1s are a royal pain from the telco side of things, they work so well because they use such high powers to make sure that they are heard (close to 300V instead of 52 for telephone) but this causes all sorts of trouble, due to the crosstalk these things put out every T1 line that's installed reduces the number of ADSL customers we can put in the same cable, one T1 line can easily destroy the ability to carry DSL in the same binder group (25 pairs) and over longer distances or with several T1 lines can wipe out the whole cable for DSL. This is a major problem for us, so if we're going to have to work around these sorts of issues, we want it to be worth our while. that doesn't even go in to factors such as the equipment, a DSL modem costs about $50 or less these days, but a T1 "modem" is in the thousands, same deal with the equipment at the other end of the line, then you add the line conditioning that has to be done on longer lines when provisioning a T1, and the list goes on.
DSL is a great product, if you don't absolutely need a T1, then by all means take advantage of the fact that DSL lines are dirt cheap these days.
but when you need a T1 and nothing else will do, don't complain about the cost, it is after all your choice.
Informative? Hah (Score:5, Informative)
T1 lines send digital signals with almost NO current. This is due to the balanced encoding used on the line. There are two primary encodings used in North America (Europe has their own standard): B8ZS [wikipedia.org] and AMI [wikipedia.org]. These encodings ensure that the number of positive signals sent are roughly the same as number of the negative signals sent, resulting in an average DC voltage close to zero. While I don't doubt your anecdote about techs using their fingers to test if a line is live, the signal they experience has more in common with AC than DC.
The electrical specifications of a T1 [inetdaemon.com] show that it uses {-12, 0 12}V DC as the signaling alphabet. This is not the "hundreds of DC volts" you claim (maybe you were confused with the POTS system which uses 90V RMS ringer signal).
I don't know much about the politics of the system (I've only designed endpoint equipment and had little interaction with customers), but I know your technical details were rather specious. Do you have any evidence to back your other claims?
Re:Absolute BS. (Score:2, Informative)
We had 8 t1s bonded with 70ms of latencey to the first hop the telcos response "We don't do anything unless its at 80ms", and this was
with only 3mbs being used on the connection.
We are quite happy now that we dropped our t1 connections from the telcos, and switched to a big fiber connection to the cable company.
We are connected right to their headend with a high capacity wireless link and also fiber transport from their headend to two other locations
Not to mention the Customer Service with them is way better, faster, knowledgable, and understandable (no language barrier).
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Informative)
How else does that signal go from the DSL modem to the CO? Yeh, it travels the phonelines. At least from your modem to the nearest DSLAM. The DSLAM filters out that signal and sends it on on a seperate path back through the data circuits.
T1 Also uses phone lines, though the originating and terminating equipment on the segment from the remote terminal to the customer site are changed to stuff to handle T1 (or HDSL, depending on which is actually used to carry the signal). At the customer end, a box much larger than your standard telco dmarc box is installed containing a "smartjack". Basically it holds a card (Adtran H2TUR normally, with space for 2) that takes the signal from the telco and changes the output to T1. Sometimes it doesnt do anything but strip out the line power as the telco signal is T1 (also called "4wire" or "True" T1), the line power is for the card/repeaters to function. Usually, they send the T1 via some flavor of HDSL and use the smartjack to change it back to T1 signaling. This is a "2wire" T1, which uses only a single pair of copper, same as your standard POTs phone line. Normally, the telco tech will just move the pairs on each end to the new equipment to change it from POTs to T1. If they cant, or the trunk line for that segment has no pairs good enough to carry the signal, they might have to pull a new line... which isnt cheap. T1s are also notorious for wreaking havok on DSL subscribers that happen to share a trunk ;) .
tm
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:2, Informative)
One tip for usenet - although you seem to be maxing your line anyway - some providers have a way to select a particular route to/from them. Easynews, maximumusenet, and I think giganews can do this, and likely others. Try their traceroute page and pick the one with the fewest hops, or shortest latency, to you.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:3, Informative)
In a point-to-point, telco-tech sense, no, T-1s cannot be oversubscribed, not like frame relay can be. However, they can (and damn well ARE) in an internet-bandwidth sense. Do you seriously propose that all ISPs maintain excess upstream bandwidth equal to all their customer T-1s added together? Hell no.
I've worked for a number of ISPs and telcos over the years, and I know for a fact we oversold our available bandwidth. Sometimes the customer noticed, sometimes not. Of course, when the customer noticed, more upstream was added in a hurry... at least, when we wanted to keep the customer, it was.
You say you sold circuits. I think you may have confused the concept of point-to-point circuits with the concept of selling an Internet Connection-- if you follow me.
Re:Informative? Hah (Score:2, Informative)
Try it and see!
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:2, Informative)
True, you can use a phone that's plugged into the unfiltered line. In my experience, there is noise and it is annoying. I put a filter on it, and the noise went away. We've already agreed that the DSL equipment doesn't need an external filter, but I bet it has an internal filter to eliminate "noise" from the voice frequencies. (Technically, it probably has a band-pass filter that only allows the frequencies it uses.)
Power lines carry AC operating at a single frequency (60Hz U.S., 50Hz Europe). Any electrical engineer should be able to tell you how to build a simple filter to eliminate interference caused by a single frequency. I can't speak for electric fences, but I suspect they use single-frequency AC as well. In any case, I think it's safe to say that most homes don't have an electric fence close enough to cause noticeable interference. Environmental interference from other electronic devices in the home or office are the real problem, because they might generate noise on a variety of frequencies. If you have such a problem, it's possible to build a filter that eliminates the interference, as long as it occurs at frequencies outside the normal range of the device receiving the interference. Otherwise, you'll just have to build tinfoil hats for you and all your devices.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:3, Informative)
Other people have replied and asked about how to go about this. We did it by accident once, I'm not sure how to do it officially. BT's phone system is a maze, but somewhere on the web there are direct dial numbers for a bunch of companies / shortcut keys to drop out of voicemail menus. When we had a problem I got transferred to some random engineer at an exchange who adjusted our account for us. YMMV.
To be fair, this guy also transferred our DSL from one phone line to another, something that the ISP denied was possible, and tried to charge us a £60 re-activation fee for. They argued the case until we cancelled the account and signed up with another ISP - without an activation fee as DSL was setup on our new line. One more reason to avoid plusnet like the plague...
Finally, the phone companies might not like the loss of revenue, but if there is no technical reason to enforce the bundling they may be forced to accept it. Take a look at the recent bank charges scandal here in the UK for a similar example.
Re:Absolute BS. (Score:2, Informative)
I think that he was not referring to the actual T1 bandwidth itself, but the amount of upstream bandwidth in front of the T1. ISP A sells 100 T1's to 100 customers, but then only buys 50Mbits of bandwitdh from their provider...guess what, they have oversubscribed all of their T1 customers.
Re: Why are T1 lines still expensive (Score:4, Informative)
I have experimented with DSL, but it doesn't compare. For one thing, I serve out a lot of data... my T1's pipe is usually 100% full in the outgoing direction all the time. I can't afford to have hicups. I had a backup DSL line for a while but the outgoing bandwidth sucked rocks. For another, the T1 is considered a special business line and when something goes wrong, the phone company hops on it immediately (though I still have to talk to two entities.. the phone company and the ISP). Still, things get fixed fairly quickly compared to a normal phone line.
Is it worth $300/month for 1.5 MBits in both directions with guarenteed bandwidth and guarenteed quick service? It probably wouldn't be for your run of the mill power user, but for someone like me who is serving out an open source project and managing half a dozen domains, web sites, and mail for friends and family, I just can't afford to have too much downtime or unmanaged bandwidth.
I still have to research a possible cable solution. I haven't heard of the cable company having a guarenteed bandwidth service with that much uplink but who knows, maybe they've done it while I wasn't looking. I dunno about reliability, service, or ping times, though. I kinda like having a 4ms ping.
I wish there were fiber on my street. Maybe some day.
-Matt
Re:Informative? Hah (Score:3, Informative)
Over the last thirteen years, I've ordered dozens of point-to-point, frame relay, local voice, long distance, PRI, supertrunk, and Internet access circuits in the form of T1 lines from LEC, CLEC, and ILEC telcos around the country. I've gotten buildings lit with SONET and seen dramatic price drops as a result. I've also dealt with about a dozen T3 lines and about a hundred Internet connections over Ethernet.
I can tell you that Internet connections over 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet, where available, can be much cheaper than T1 or T3 lines. Why? Because they aren't encumbered by the same infrastructure costs, tariff schedules, or the access-speed-plus-mileage pricing model that you get with T1 and T3 lines. The router interfaces on the customer premises equipment are a lot cheaper for Ethernet than for WAN technologies, too. For Internet access or MAN links, Ethernet has major advantages over T1 and T3 lines, but it's usually only available in colo facilities or office buildings with SONET gear.
All that being said, I still think it's pretty sad how few telecomm guys there are around here. I guess I must just be getting too old for Slashdot.