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Why Are T1 Lines Still Expensive?
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?"
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.
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.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I had an early ISP in the 90's, and we almost went out of business when our T1 line went down, and they had that "We'll fix it when we get around to it" attitude.
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.
Quite.
If you want to see how stupid telephone pricing is, compare POTS (that's your usual analog service) to ISDN, in the US. ISDN is expensive, POTS isn't.
Why? Because once upon a time ISDN was seen as a premium product and POTS wasn't. But actually, ISDN is in some respects cheaper, especially when you compare it to two POTS lines. ISDN is essentially a direct digital connection to the exchange, whereas POTS requires all kinds of tricks to work. And with two line POTS, you're talking about requiring twice the infrastructure, compared to ISDN.
POTS is a consumer product. DSL is a consumer product. T1 isn't, and ISDN is too obscure for the telcos to even bother marketing it. So T1 and ISDN end up costing rather more than they should.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Does DSL even use a classic phone circuit? My understanding was that DSL used frequencies unused by voice and was pulled off the line by separate hardware that had nothing to do with a phone circuit. You can get DSL without phone service... Well, sometimes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually, this is a very good question. First because it seems like better options are available with higher bandwidth that make T1's less attractive if you have a little more money to spend. For some applications where bandwidth guarantees are critical (like a VoIP phone system or PBX for a 200 person company), the fact you are guaranteed to get 1.5 Mbps is great. For small companies, like mine, even if the effective bandwidth drops to 256k, it is still plenty. I had a go-around with Verizon a few years back over SDSL. They were committed to offer only T1's, but I didn't need that much bandwidth and couldn't afford the quoted $800 a month and change. I bought a 384k SDSL (384k upload and download) line from Covad, and could have gone up to 768 for something like 250 a month. (At the time that included a whopping 32 static IP's as well).
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
Out in the rural areas, you can certainly get an enormous plate of rice with beef/chicken, tea, bread and fruit for $1.00. A beer/soft-drink will vary between $0.50-3.00. But Phnom Penh and Siem Reap ranges from $5 up to $50 depending on where you go. I travelled through the country for about 16 days last November and didn't see any lobster. Top of the range, but a club sandwich at the FCC in Siem Reap was $10, but oh my god was it worth it. Cambodia is great - lovely people.
How about if you can get an Ethernet line to your flat for 100Mbps upload and download at $35/month?
I think it's more to do with them not wanting home users to set up servers. A server is (especially if it's a big one), more likely to have a higher average bandwidth usage then a regular home user. You'll have all the users connected to the server in addition to all the regular home user bandwidth usage. Even if the server only has a few users connected to whatever services it provides at a time, that's a much bigger chunk of bandwidth then their projected "average user".
They figure that if they make it very unattractive to run servers by giving you a very small upstream cap, then only very few will try. They want those users who run servers to upgrade to (more expensive) "business class" services, that have higher upstream caps and (at least I would hope, though maybe I wouldn't hold my breath) better support.
At least, those are the reasons they gave me one time when they temporarily pulled the plug on my connection...
Completely clueless post. You DO NOT oversubscribe T1. T1 is dedicated pipe. End of the story. You can oversubscribe Frame Relay, though. I worked for BBN Planet at some point, and was involved with oversubscription issues (Frame Relay). That was BS #1. Now BS #2 is "DSL requires one phone line, T1 requires many phone lines". That's 64 DS0 you have in mind, right? So, the reason it is BS is that "DSL requires one phone line" from the customer premises to the nearest DSLAM only. From that point, that has to be a fat pipe (but guess, what? DSLAM is another point you can do oversubscription.
I work at a canadian telco and if I ever want to placate customers about prices I just quote them US high speed prices. They are ussually four times as expensive for the same service. ADSL 3.0 MB is 39.95 CND here with great up time and very low saturation. I get 300KB downloads almost all the time.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
A (traditional) T1 uses 2 pair of copper wires - that's all. Just because it can carry 24 DS0 channels doesn't mean that it actually consists of 24 separate phone lines. The high price of a T1 is due to it's CIR, installation costs, and line maintenance. You can't send a DS1 signal over an ordinary analog phone line. You have to install a separate digital line from the CO to the customer premises with digital signal repeaters every mile or so. That costs money to install and maintain. You can get a fractal T1 line for fairly cheap, if you're willing to lower your CIR enough and if you can find other parties with whom to split the installation fees.
As parent notes, the difference is the bandwidth and QOS guarantee. That's the difference between a phone line and VoIP too, which is why VoIP is still a long way off being a reliable service. If I want the cops or an ambulance, I don't want my call competing with porn browsing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I remember seeing people run down to the drug store and stick their tubes into the little machine
that told them whether it was good. It was the end of the consumer era of do-it-yourself.
This T1 deal looks much like Mainframe stuff. People have hard time understanding how IBM/Sun can sell those with such prices but when they hear about the service/uptime guarantee mainframe provides, they begin to understand.
:)
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, as they won't even click "reload" and go to another site, it would cost $3000. There goes 3x T1 Monthly price
You are speaking about the performance, well a site should better be down rather than "serving" a DSL customer 10kb/sec so it is the same deal.
Let me count the ways.....
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
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I'm not sure when you last looked, but you are not always guaranteed your provider will not oversubscribe you for a T1. In fact, this is regular practice that your ISP does oversubscribe.
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" T1 providers (jokers like One Comm, TDS Metrocom, Covad (RFC1918 private IPs in your routes?!? are you for real?!?)) that treat T1 line customers the same as consumer DSL customers who have poor or no SLA terms. In fact some of them even state they will cap or disconnect you if you use too much bandwidth!!
Bottom line, if you want good service the connection type is not as critical as the SLA. A good ISP with a decent SLA can actually provide realiable DSL service. Like wise a crappy ISP with no SLA will provide you with poor T1 service. In both cases you see the opposite of what is typically expected by the market place for the type of technology being used. Neither technology is reliable in the hands of idiot and/or cheap skate ISPs...
You folks are getting close, but you're still missing it: T1 is for access to the *synchronous* backbone - very low jitter, no dropped bits, extremely stable bit rates. T1 is a *premium* communication medium left over from the days when the only way to get voice into digital format was PCM vocoding at 8kHz, and that bit stream had to be carried *perfectly* from one side of the network to the other (no buffering, no error correction, at least in the bad old days.) In addition, as a *telephone* service (make no mistake about that, it is telephone, not internet; that you can use it for internet access is irrelevant), the service providers are required by regulatory authorities to give you five-nines availability. You bet your ass T1 is still expensive! What we get on cable or DSL is like an all-you-can buffett at a greasy spoon - cheap, and with good reason, but if all you need is calories, it will do just fine. The real question is not why T1 is still expensive, but why the garbage we get for DSL and cable is so over-priced.
I don't know if this is worth mentioning, but I'm about to upgrade to a 10 mbps from the 1.544 T1. I think its a new not available everywhere low end OC3 DIA line over copper. Thats about 6.5 times the bandwidth, and about twice the price of T1.
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
In a word. _NO_
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...
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Actually, most countries still do, at least in the sense that they have a message courier service. IE when a phone call won't work, you can pay to have a western union guy deliver what's essentially a fax today.
Guaranteed delivery (via signature) makes it useful for official documentation.
I don't read AC A human right
'IE when a phone call won't work'
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 might go out during storms in VERY VERY rural areas... like a ranger station in the mountains or some such but they have radios that usually reach somewhere with phones. The last time there was a hurricane here (miami) postal mail resumed the following day. The time before that it was 2 days.
'Guaranteed delivery (via signature) makes it useful for official documentation.'
Here in the states we have registered mail. Postal mail takes 2 or 3 days at most and with registered mail the recipient must show ID and sign. As far as I know that is how all legal and official documentation is sent (at least it is what attorneys always seem to recommend). It also has an air of respect that western union lacks since the U.S. Postal service is a quasi government entity.
Its no secret that we are little US centric in our thinking (not surprising because our nation is large enough that many have never left it) and I suppose I've fallen victim to this. I suppose phones are big here because they were invented here. The nation is again, very large and spread out so a strong communications backbone tied with a strong transportation backbone (consisting of roads, highways, and interstates) are the very core of our society. That some might still be using technology that became obsolete 100 years ago is mind boggling.
"with registered mail the recipient must show ID and sign"
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...
Need Mercedes parts ?
What is the uptime guarantee?
/. talking about SLAs, etc (its a weird form of techno elitism - I work with T1s and T3s, you are a lowly DSL user, let me explain why I am better than you, I have a very important "S" "L" "A"). Past 12 months - cable outages 0, DSL outages 0, T1 outages and suckiness more than 7. What good is an SLA if you have to spend time and money "lawyering up" and documenting and trying to prove that the line performance sucks and that it is their fault. The A in SLA only works if both parties are really A'ing and not one party saying "Haha, we are going to give you whatever SL we want and you A to bend over and take it because the A you A'd to is written by satan's lawyer."
Presumably no worse than the shitty service I get from SBC on multiple T1s at different offices in different towns that have packet drop issues and other issues that I monitor and report to their shitty support and get a shitty ticket that their shitty service people sit on for days - fuck these self important asses on
With a T1 over a DSL, what you get is a higher cost pain in the ass, not better service, not some magic that make the giant telecomm jump to attention and say "Oooh, this loser has a T1, we'd better get right on that and blame someone else and close the ticket".
Do yourself a favor and get a few DSLs from different providers if you can and a cable connection if you can and let the US telecomm shove their T1 and their SLAs. Note: Symmetrical lines don't kill competent telecomm companies, they can manage it in Japan, Northern Europe and I believe Korea - we in the US and UK get "A"DSL lines because it is another way the telecomms fuck us just because they can.
It does seem that a large part of the T-1 price is due to the upload speed. If we compare it to symmetric DSL, it is priced similarly. Here are the prices that I just got from http://www.att.com/dsl:
AT&T Business Class DSL
Download/upload speeds (users/monthly price)
Multi-IP IDSL 144-144Kbps ($142.45)
SDSL 192-192Kbps ($142.45)
SDSL 384-384Kbps ($179.95)
SDSL 768-768Kbps ($188.96)
SDSL 1.1-1.1Mbps ($244.96)
SDSL 1.5-1.5Mbps ($279.96)
I hope you meant $200/hundred DIDs b/c otherwise Verizon is ripping you a new one or the market has gone to shinola. I left telecom about six years ago but I remember putting in orders for a hundred DIDs at a time and I know it wasn't $20k.
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 all those 800s so most of 'em where divided in the switch into 3-12 channel pools. Wasn't the most effective use of our channels but each 800 was billed separately and several clients preferred it this way. Kept their costs down if they were low volume since our shared pool costs were cost effective at around 4-5 channels. We kept most of the PRIs with DIDs so that we could rearrange the circuit loading by repointing the 800 and managing the channels on the switch, which tended to be necessary when clients would have a big marketing push and request going from 2 channels to a high volume pool. Usually they requested it after their clients complained about getting busy signals and we reminded them about the way they cheaped out on the contract.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
That's oversimplifying the service offerings and associated costs.
Verizon didn't lower their service charges by ~80%, undercutting their profitable T1 sales to business and institutional customers. They can only make more money by adding customers. FIOS primarily competes with cable-modem ISP services. It's a good deal compared to a cable modem and for a business which can't justify the cost of a T1, it looks like a good service.
But FIOS for business does not provide an SLA equivalent to Internet T1 service.
From the Verizon Business FIOS disclaimer:
Speed and uninterrupted use of the service are not guaranteed.
This is one of the main reasons why FIOS for business starts at $69/month and a Verizon (or similar) T1 with Internet service starts at around $600/month. The upload speed, average latency, and guaranteed latency are important factors as well.
In terms of variable costs, the SLA is probably the most expensive part of the service in terms of labor and management/monitoring infrastructure. Verizon has plenty of infrastructure to manage and monitor T1's, ISDN lines, POTS lines and other high-volume telecom circuit types. But FIOS uses different distribution, cable plant, and customer premises equipment than all the other Verizon services. This creates an entire new set of costs. This is why they don't offer it for FIOS - it's too expensive to build out the management systems, add NOC staff, and build the new FIOS network services at the same time.
FIOS may be offered with more substantial service guarantees in the future - I hope it is - but right now Verizon is learning how to operate their FIOS networks with consumers and small businesses as guinea pigs.