On Thu, Jan 26, 2012, Raymond Lillard wrote:
On 01/26/2012 03:43 PM, Gordon Messmer wrote:
On 01/26/2012 09:09 AM, Jason T. Slack-Moehrle wrote:
They advertise the starting "Business T" at 1.5Mbps per second They advertise the ADSL2+ 2 lines at up to 40Mbps per second. Am I mis-understanding that the cost for a T seems high, but a better option for me than getting their ADSL2+ service? I mean, is the "T" faster over all given it is all my traffic and I am not sharing? Can you explain a bit so I can develop a better understanding of how they advertise speeds, etc?
Yes, the cost for a T1 will seem very high. It is antiquated telco tech. T1s are generally very reliable, but very very slow.
Slow is relative. Our T1 is infinitly faster than a cable or DSL circuit when the power is out, which happens quite frequently here. Every time the Comcast/Xfinity folks come around trying to sell their services I note that when we had a week-long outage about 14 months ago, our generator kept the computers going, and USWorst's T1 never faltered. Comcast was down for that week, and another after the power came back up.
Yes they are indeed slow and reliable. That said, on the rare occasion they do go out, they get repaired quickly. This may not not be true in you case, but usually T1 lines are tariffed with guaranteed uptimes if you ask the right questions and read the fine print.
We are a bit more the 20,000 feet from the local CO, and have had a couple of occassions in the last 13 years where they have replaced the entire circuit when having problems with repeaters and such. For a while there were incidents where a telco tech buggered our T1 while trying to grab pairs in a terminal block for voice lines.
I have had clients on DSL be down for a few days while the telco got a round tuit.
Same here, even in commercial areas of Seattle where one would expect the infrastructure to be solid.
There are two reasons T1 is more expensive. T1 requires 2 copper pairs in the cable. Those 2 pairs not available for voice traffic. The other reason is the uptime requirements.
DSL, while faster, does not preclude using the pair for voice traffic, uses a single copper pair and has no uptime commitments.
You can also share voice and data over a single T1. We have a couple of voice lines on our T1 which are split out with an Adtran channel bank that our provider supplies. I like this as it replaced the old Linux box we had with a (expensive) Sangoma card connecting to the T1.
Another option which someone else mentioned is direct ethernet connections. We have a client in an industrial area of South Seattle that got that recently, and has been quite happy with it.
Bill