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.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Funny)
"I wanted to go to Cambodia. You can get a lobster dinner for a dollar."
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Funny)
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, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (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 numb
Re: (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
Re: (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 us
Re: (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 voi
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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:4, Funny)
FINALLY! A real reason to upgrade to a T1: Piss off the neighbors.
-l
Re: (Score:2)
Absolute BS. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Absolute BS. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen it done, and would not be surprised at all if the majority of tier 1's do it. It's a huge waste of money to assume that all your customers will use all their bandwidth all the time.
The only added service a T1 buys you is a more sympathetic ear when problems crop up.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
He's talking about your provider overselling their bandwidth, and it happens. I worked for a tier 1 provider for five years, and was there before we got our first VC round. There was a point at which we were buying 1 T1 (from UUnet, I think), and selling 20+ T1s. Good stuff.
Re:Absolute BS. (Score:5, Insightful)
But you do most certainly oversubscribe the connection onwards from wherever the lines (be they t1 or adsl) terminate.
Put differently, if you've got 10.000 subscribers for 1Mbps ADSL, you most certainly don't hook these into the Internet using a 10Gbit link. If you did, you'd be having 95% overcapacity on average, and probably 80% overcapacity at the peaks. (i.e. you'd literally *never* use more than 20% of your bandwith)
Same applies if your customers come in over T1-lines.
Now, there's still differences. Typical el-cheapo consumer-isps tend to simply accept that their lines spike for 10% or more of the time. In other words, if their actual load is 100Mbps average, 500Mbps peak, they'll buy perhaps 200Mbps, and simply accept that nobody gets more than half their rated speed if surfing at peak times.
ISPs with a higher service-level try to keep their capacity around peak. Which means that if they calculated correctly, you'll "always" get your rated speed. You *may* on occasion experience sligthly less if they miscalculated.
Insane ISPs, like Uninett has a target bandwith of 150% of the highest experienced former peak. In other words, aslong as *now* doesn't have 1.5 times the highest load experienced in the past, you'll get your rated speed. Notice that this too is probably an order of magnitude less bandwith than you'd need if you did not overprovision.
Not overprovitioning is a lot like building roads as if everyone who owns a car would be driving it 24/7/365. If you did, you'd be spending 10 times the money on roads from whats really required.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It is artificially limited at 25Mbps (symetrically) for the fairly simple reason that I don't care paying for 50. Said fibre terminates in a local concentrator, along with 170 others from my neighbourhood, total bandwith subscribed about 2Gbps. (most go for the lowest speed, 6Mbps since that's sufficient for many) The link from there to the isp-central ? 10Gbps cu
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Like many things it depends on what level of ISP you are dealing with. The professional ones (Level 3, XO, TWTelecom) state in their SLA they will not oversubscribe and in some cases in go into detail as to how they monitor their backbone(s) for congestion and what they do about it. It's the less expensive "business class"
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: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: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Funny)
Nietzsche, of course. "802.11g is dead."
Re: (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 kn
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It may be that the marketing gurus brand T1 as "the product with the guaranteed bandwidth", but believe me, I have 512/512 SDSL here, also with a guaranteed bandwidth of > 90%.
Moreover, the connection between your DSL-Modem (ADSL/SDSL whatever) and the DSLAM at the telco can never be overbooked, if the data rate is set to e.g. 2048/512 then this speed is fixed. From the DSLAM to the provider/Internet, the line may of course be overbooked, but this ha
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Our call center wasn't that large onsite but we provided services for for lots of VARs who'd use their own brand and did a lot of call re-routing. I think at one point there were more than a hundred 1-800 numbers pointed at our Meridian. We only had about 30 T1s for al
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:5, Informative)
Re: (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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Guaranteed delivery (via signature) makes it useful for official documentation.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, that's happened to me a couple times when there were hurricanes. Of course the phone lines carry their own power but the power was out everywhere and everyone is bored when the power is out so all the circuits were busy. Outside of hurricanes I haven't seen phones not work (beyond a single home or phone) in 25 years. They are actually pretty damn reliable here in the states. If you are in a very rural area sometimes you get static during a storm. I suppose the phones m
Re:P & T (Score:4, Interesting)
There's another difference with registered mail. Say you want to ship somebody a $10,000 watch. Do you fedex it? No. It goes registered mail. Why? Fedex is just some company and if they lose it (it happens) or it gets stolen (this happens more often) your recourses are insurance or civil prosecution. But, if you send it registered mail and it gets stolen its literally a federal offence; heads roll and the FBI investigates. I used to buy and sell watches and in this industry things tend not to get lost with registered mail. But with private couriers? Uh, well, people use registered mail...
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (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
Re: (Score:2)
Basically the United States is by no means an internet forerunner. We are being dragged into the past by the telcos. Cancel your landline today!
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Funny)
I'll get right on that when my torrents finish.
Re: (Score:2)
just look at TimeWarner/Verizon/Optimum/Comcast/etc... frequent outages, sometimes for seconds (just a blip) and sometimes for an hour or more. There are absolutely no guarantees of anything; and that includes there's no guarantee they won't drop your ass if they *
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Funny)
not a typo. I'm complaining because we got a letter that said we now get 15mbit down, when in reality I'm still seeing 8mbit speeds. if I read online that we should have 15mbit, but I wasn't told that, it wouldn't' be such a big deal...
Just yesterday my roomate got a notice that he was overusing the campus network - 108 GB in one week. It's hanging on our door now.
oh man, I should post some stats that the netadmin at my school sent me when I was there. They threatened to shut us down and kick us out of the dorms if we kept it up. This is in 99/00, before napster got popular and downloaded movies took 2 full CDs and were mpeg format. my roommate and I both had a 2x burner and I had a 4GB and a 6GB drive in my computer, while he had 2 10GB drives. we were downloading faster than we could burn and by the end of the year we had a collection of over 300 movies.
In the email the netAdmin sent us, we were using the full dorm bandwidth (1MB/sec) sustained, both ways for 14 days straight with only the occasional break (when looking at the graphs, it was the times we ran out to get CDRs or we had to run around to other students and ask to borrow HD space in exchange for a copy of a movie).
THOSE were the days. you kids and your torrent files and your 500GB drives. Hell, I remember when you had to really SEARCH to find a server that had a decent selection AND gave you decent transfer speeds.
Re: (Score:2)
They also give you a guaranteed service level. If you need service the same day, they are generally there whereas you could wait several days for techs from CATV/Telco.
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: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
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
The difference between phone and VOIP (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I was visiting a admin friend of a major online shop, he was watching the stats/connected clients for a quick maintanance, it only dropped to 3000 guys at 4 AM. That is not Amazon for sure. Now imagine the line goes off mysteriously and those 3000 people have $10 in their shopping card,
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).
Inertia and Marketing (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course thats all crap, but hey, there's one born every minute.
consumer vs buisness grade (Score:2)
Now, how true this all is....
Re:consumer vs buisness grade (Score:4, Funny)
I know that Pacific Bell T1s always came with business grade support - as in, they are provided to you by a business whose motto is "We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company."
Fairly straight forward to me.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You dont have the option of moving to a Cable connection, or even several, because of the need for so much upload. You're stuck. And there's no incentive to lower prices.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why are vacuum tubes expensive? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why are vacuum tubes expensive? (Score:5, Funny)
If I had mod points, I'd give them to you!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The expression "WHOOOOSH" comes to mind here.
A T1 is not shared (Score:2)
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:It's not the speed (Score:5, Interesting)
In the early days, we plugged into a group called CICNet, which was one of the old regional NSF providers. And they were incredible -- if we unplugged our router to physically move it, we'd get a phone call making sure we were ok.
But during the later 90's, one provider kept buying up another, and service went down the tubes. I get substantially better service on my cable modem than I got from about 3 different companies who managed the same T1 line in those days.
At the end, we went down, and I went down to their sales office, and said, I'm not leaving until someone gets on this, and the guy gave me a VP's phone number. And I called and called and called, and eventually he gave in and put a tech on my problem. When it was fixed, and I thanked him, I mentioned it was a T1. And he said, "What, after all this you don't even have a T3?"
I expect it's better now that we don't have the same sort of churning and consolidation in the industry. But my experience with T1 lines both at my ISP, and at other jobs, where we had them brought in, has been a lot rockier than anything I've ever experienced on either DSL or cable lines at home.
Obviously, my anecdotal experience isn't a solid statistical picture, and I'm not claiming it is. And maybe this was epecially nightmarish because we were in Chicago, where the quality of these types of services is very low. But it was far and away the hardest and most nightmarish part of my job.
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 w
It's marketing (Score:3, Insightful)
T-1s are "old", business-class products. So they are not sold by the same marketoid types who push consumer broadband.
Dont't forget that you're dealing with a big phone company, so your everyday normal cartesian logic will not take hold there.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Service level (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, the hardware costs for T1 are higher. We can support something like 8000 DSL subscribers on a $25K BRAS, while a 4 port channelized DS3 card (supporting 112 T1s) runs around $45K (and that's just the interface card; the router costs another $30K+).
Guaranteed transport security (Score:3, 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.
Re:Guaranteed transport security (Score:5, Insightful)
T1s are point-to-point circuit switched connections. The Internet only factors in if one device on that point-to-point connection happens to be a gateway router.
Being point to point, it's isolated, secured, easier to secure, and probably guaranteed via some policy or contract. You don't share with no one.
DSL has a same setup; you don't share your connection like cable internet. However, with DSL, you only have a closed circuit between you and an isp. To reach your office across the state, the connection has to traverse your ISP's routers and distribution systems then to your office's. Do a traceroute one day.
With a T1, the closed circuit is between you and your office cross-state. Your ISP only uses layer 2 switching to make sure the circuit takes the optimal path. Once it's connected, it's locked in. And unlike internet via DSL or cable with your ISP in the mix, TCP/IP doesn't have to factor in at all if you don't want it to. You get your choice of protocols for addressing and transport.
You seem to think because since you saw some guy hooking up what looked like a phone jack to your buddy's computer that you're en expert in the field and have the right to be a pretentious dick about it. Sorry to disappoint you.
In this case, the medium is not quite as important. The cabling is nothing much more then a polished POTS line. However, you still have the other 6 layers of the OSI model to think about.
Guarantees are less important (Score:3, Interesting)
Service outage response time (Score:2)
Yes, it is a scam.
4 count 'em 4 wires. (Score:2)
DSL is a 2 wire system, as it's just a POTS line. T1s have a pair for transmit and a pair for receive.
T1s have traditionally cost more than DSL and thus have an expectation of reliability. The expectation translates into extra workers watching, and better equipment used in it.
More wires = more space on equipment and on poles.
Better equipment = more money.
More expectations = more payrole.
Remember price per quality is a non-linear relationship.
USE GOOGLE... (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.google.com/search?q=why+are+t1s+expens
First 10hits are questions on "Why is a T1 more expensive than DSL?"
Must be a slow news day.
(i know this is a troll but, "ask slashdot" questions should not be answered with the FIRST TEN hits in a google search).
Re:USE GOOGLE... (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.
Wireless ISP joke (Score:5, Funny)
"I was a hard-working clerk making $30,000 per year. I was frugal, living carefully, saving my money, and I was happy and content.
Then one day I fell in with some shady characters and I got suckered into a high-stakes poker game. That was my ruin. Now I am anxious, stressed, and miserable."
His friend says "So you fell into temptation and lost all your savings?"
"No, I won, and like a fool I bought this lousy Wireless internet company."
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.
Not surprising? (Score:3, Funny)
Why just last week, I was talking to my local ISP about my situation. I was interested in upgrading my 28.8 kilobaud Internet connection to a 1.5 megabit fiber optic T1 line, and was trying to determine if they were able to provide an IP router that was compatible with my Token Ring Ethernet LAN configuration. The bastard just looked at me blankly and asked:
"Can I have some money now?"
I mean, how the fuck are prices suppose to fall with that attitude?
Should have tried the Internet King (Score:3, Funny)
T1 Prices not Changing in 10 Years????? Wrong! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
You're not paying for the bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
But, my understanding was (and someone please correct me if I am wrong) that a T1 line is a dedicated connection: The telcos create a complete, unimpeded circuit, point-to-point, from where you are, to wherever you are paying to have it terminate (generally at your ISP).
If "where you are" happens not to be serviced by fiber, then they have to dedicate a pair of copper wires to you: That removes a physical pair of wires, along the entire pathway of the T1 circuit from where you are, to where it terminates, for so far as is necessary to do so.
And, I suppose, even if you have fiber servicing where you are, somewhere along the way they still have to provision that bandwidth, to dedicate it to you, and again that removes part of their capacity from "general" use.
Compare and contrast that to DSL and Cable broadband access: They both *share* bandwidth: For DSL, it's shared on the phone line, for Cable, it's shared on the cable connection.
But, in neither of the latter 2 cases, is any of the upstream bandwidth dedicated exclusively to your use, in either direction.
THAT is what you are paying for, for a T1 line, etc. - dedicated symmetrical bandwidth: For a T1 line, you get 1.54 Mbps, in BOTH directions, guaranteed.
And again, that's my poor understanding of this.
As much as I hate car analogies, here's one that is close, I think: Consider the current road systems, in any particular country. You have a combination of local roads, that link to freeways, highways, etc.
When you get a dedicated circuit, such as a T1 line, you are paying for a "road", from where you are, to your ISP, one which has no other "cars" on it, except for those that YOU put on the road. At some point, that "road", merges onto a "highway", and then YOU are then paying the "road provider" for the privilege of a dedicated "lane": They are blocking off a section of their "highway" to make a "lane" for YOUR use, only, and in doing so, they are removing it from general use.
And, that "lane" is "two-way", BTW: The "cars" that travel from where you are, do so at full speed, without "stop lights", etc. - and when they return, they return in the same way.
And that's why T1 lines are still "so expensive" - though their cost HAS dropped, and remarkably so, considering.
Oh, and yes, the analogy breaks down, past the point where the "lane" meets the ISP... so?
T1's (Score:5, Interesting)
1) T1, down at 3AM saturday. No problem, people are working on it.
Business class DSL: Bawahahahahaha...call who?
Cable: We don't work weekends.
2) Reliability. The infrastructure difference between DSL and Cable vs T1's are incredibly different.
T1's are simple in comparison compared to a DSL or Cable infrastructure. Too many people and too many things that can go wrong.
When I run a NAGIOS report for all my DSL lines and Cable lines and compare it to my T1 line over a complete 365 day interval:
My T1 had one incident in July of last summer with a direct lightening strike, was down for 3 hours. Didn't even have to call anyone, they had people working on it Sunday evening, and I got a voice mail it would be up in about 3-5 hours.
I have Sangoma cards in my Linux routers, and from what I can tell there was also a down/up event last year for about 1 second in my logs.
DSL line: It has had over 20 down events which I would call momentary lapses, 13 outright drops for 30-40 minutes at a time, and 80-100 quality alerts that indicated dropped packets or packet loss. I have two NAGIOS servers too, one for monitoring the internal network and one to monitor the outside network.
I made the NAGIOS box to monitor the ISP's so that I could tell if they were having an external or internal problem with thier networks.
6 times I had to dial in and remotely login to the AC strip and dump the power to the DSL unit to reset it, which would then "fix" whatever it was that made it loose its marbles.
One instance one of my facilities was down for almost 3 days, no DSL service. Something happened when SBC upgraded the line, as I asked SBC for a bandwidth increase. The SBC rep told me it was "standard practice" to change your IP address space with a line speed increase.
WT? When I pointed out changing the static IP's without telling your customers could have adverse affects on businesses VPN links, I got the "Well, thats what we do." I prompted told them to put the service I had back in place, they couldn't. They erased the passwords on the DSL modem and didn't have them.
They wanted me to drive 35 miles to a facility to put the password back into the modem.
I promptly dropped the DSL service. It didn't bother me anyway as all my locations have cable and dsl, linked through a BGP topology.
I also had the DSL modem replaced 8 times in the last 2 years at all 8 of my DSL/Cable facilities. The speedstream units suck arse. The netopia units are much better, but they still screw up once in awhile.
I even update the firmware myself, doesn't seem to make any difference so I stopped doing that.
Bottom Line: DSL saves money, it certainly does....but it isn't a 24x7 service, the customer service for business class sucks. For what you get with SBC business class cable its REALLY overpriced.
In fact, I would not call SBC business class cable anything remotely associated with "business". Its a consumer line with static IP's.
SBC can cackle all they want, but don't buy from them if your application needs anything but casual line use. It was so bad I had to buy cable as well so I could keep my facilities up 24x7.
This isn't limited to just one facility. I have Linux BGP routers in 10 facilities spread out over 50 miles. Every SBC facility equipped DSL service has the same issues.
Cable: Cable is better than DSL, only had 12 incidents. All of them related to the fact that the cable company keeps changing the signaling on the modems as the seasons go by. So, all 12 incidents were related to high packet loss due to bad signal. When they change the signaling to the cable modem, the line freaks, and they have to send a tech out to install a filter on the line. That must get REALLY expensive.
Cable is better, but running a BGP topology with multiple redundant pathways presented problems with cable and DSL.
For example, as our business grew ove
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.
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: (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 te
xo (Score:4, Interesting)
Its taken a while to install (last message from xo was that it was running at 100 mbps, I didn't see the problem) but they also said I was the first in my area to get it.
Worth a look, xo.com
Re:xo (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=xo
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.
High prices (Score:3, Insightful)
This is in Atlanta, Georgia. Not sure what prices are running in other regions of the country.
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: (Score:2)
I think it's more to do with switching. On copper you can't talk upstream and downstream at the same time. So they don't have x Mb/s up AND xMb/s down. They have x Mb/s total and they can divide that into upstream and downstream as they like, but if they give you a lot of upstream and your downstream suffers, you're much more likely to cal
Re: (Score:2)
Don't you mean "using the same frequency?" Upstream and downstream don't use the same frequency. The connection IS full duplex.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They figure that if they make it
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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:So simple it's stupid. (Score:4, Interesting)
T1 circuits are a headache for the phone company and businesses pay for it. We have had as many as 3 plus a provided hot spare at one time and they even temporarily added two more during a cutover (from Sprint to Sprint, but that is really a Sprint oddity that technically was not required). They send a person down every manhole and up every pole where there is a junction of any kind and put little red "flags" on the connector blocks for the T1 pairs. If our line went down it was back up fast. Most every T1 is sold by the local telco as the local loop charge under tarrif, with the network (Internet) connection as a "port charge". Then there are various taxes and fees. Always look at the total cost for each month, the MRC, monthly reoccuring charge. We had several incidents over since 1995 (actually surprisingly few considering the 12.5 years in total). They were almost always fixed in minutes, and 3 went beyond that, one was about 2 hours, another at 5 hours was caused by a cable cut (moving a neighborhood to fiber and they missed the red flagged connections), and the worst when Verizon swapped 2 fiber cables during a routine maintenance and that almost killed us with 20 hours of outage on thiose circuits dependant on the fibers in question. It also took out some Navy resources so I don't think they slouched on the repair time.
Like other posters are saying, you buy the guarantee of full T1 bandwidth (symmetric of course), as well as the uptime guarantee. Sprint escalates periodically the trouble ticket that is created until a Sprint VP is brought in on the issue. They currently have a horrid sales team but great backend support people.
And as to making sense to charge more to a business? Not really. Businesses are competitive and we always shop around for connectivity and bandwidth. Given equal solutions and technical staff ability, etc. we buy the lower cost solution. Consumers just don't spend the same amount of resources to locate the good deals normally, and a consumer buying a T1 is not usually looked at as a prospect for more sales. Businesses are helped to use up all the bandwidth they are sold (hopefully effectively) under the premise they will be able to buy more circuits and bandwidth. Although a T1 is also not an "average Joe" product. So there is little need to push a consumer oriented marketing drive. (And T1 tech does continue to advance, our last T1 was delivered over HSDSL, still looks like a T1 acts like a T1 etc. Just uses a slightly differnt line card, the TSU stayed the same...)
Last quip in general, a DSL line is a digital subscriber line, and covers T1, T3, ISDN, ADSL (which is commonly shortened to just DSL), SDSL, and HSDSL. At least as far as US telcos are concerned...