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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?"
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.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
There are enough decision makers who remember the 56k line days that a T1 seems impressive, and if you market it as "business class" and people start talking about E1 framing and CSU/DSUs, then its obviously cool enough for business. 1.5 Mbps SDSL somehow is kid stuff in comparison.
Of course thats all crap, but hey, there's one born every minute.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
T1 are supposed to have more of a guarantee with them. They are reliable and you tend to get your full bandwidth (which esp on cable modems you will not). They are also often packaged with 'business grade' support... though your mileage will vary there.
Now, how true this all is....
They're so expensive because there's not alot of competition for them, and if you need it, you cant live without it.
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.
US media companies are what keep upstream caps low. It's one more "anti-piracy" technique if it takes you 2 weeks to upload that DVD you just ripped to a single friend.
I can't give a better answer on why a slower link is so much more ungodly expensive, though, aside from the fact that is is -dedicated-. Cable/DSL providers all only give "best effort", so yes, you may get a nice 6mbit download...Or you may get 1mbit or less once they oversell their network based on "average usage of most consumers".
I have friends who personally had to move from RR cable to ClearWire because RR oversold their area so badly that they went from getting constant 8-10mbit downstream to never breaking above 50kb/s.
It could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
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.
Your T1 is dedicated. A DSL/Cable Modem is shared. You have 1.5Mb all the way up the chain, to the actual peering point (i guess it depends on your contract). Your 6MB Cable modem is shared among your entire neighborhood, and then all the neighborhoods share an outgoing line to the internet. (ie, they might have 45Mb for something like 100 neighborhoods, which to run every block at full speed, would require 600Mb of bandwith.)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
...service. T1 lines usually guarantee some sort of up-time percentage and a guaranteed Upload/Download throughput. Your 6MB DSL lines doesn't mean anything when the 40 people you're sharing the bandwidth with are downloading BitTorrent all day long.
It's expensive because it's not necessarily shared, you get that full 1MB -- and you aren't left in the dark when the service goes down (either it doesn't go down, or you're usually compensated for it, depending on the contract).
It's not the speed.
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
It's marketing.
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.
Where could you buy a T1 for $400/mo 10 years ago?
I have worked for small (larger than mom/pop garage but not regional/national) ISPs for over 11 years. I have seen T1 prices drop significantly in that time, but they are still a good bit more than DSL. The biggest reason is the level of service delivered. With DSL, you get "best effort" bandwidth; if the link goes down, you talk to front-line support and (mostly due to the telephone company, but again it is a cost/staffing thing) it can often take days to repair a problem. With a T1, you get your guaranteed bandwidth; if the link goes down, you talk to the network staff, and the telephone company typically must make repairs in a few hours or less (or face penalties).
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+).
Well, maybe not guaranteed, but for some security requirements, point-to-point physical security is important. In those cases, business class DSL can't make such a claim, since there are many points along the way where it goes through a CO or somesuch thing. That's what the up-front cost is for: to run a wire from your network location to the main trunk without going through anything else. Admittedly, they don't need to charge so much for the actual network service once the line is run. I don't think that there's really much additional work to support the T1 line once the connection to the trunk is made; it's straight TCP/IP from there on out.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
If you actually experience those speeds then I would say that's very cheap compared to the NYC area.
Maybe it's time for me to up grade from my 300 baud modem on my C64.
syntax error
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
Last time I checked, in our area (Utah, Qwest), a T-1 has a guaranteed response time of 4 hours. However, if a DSL line goes down they will guarantee NOT to do anything for 5 days or so.
Yes, it is a scam.
"Over the last 10 years, DSL and cable modem has upped its speed (although in some instances only slightly) and dropped its price."
I pay $46 for 7megs. When I first got cable it was thirty. If i want a price reduction, I have to buy TV programming or get the "budget" internet at like 1.5 megs for 25 bucks.
I've actually had quite the opposite problem. I was out at one site that had a good 3-4 days of downtime as Verizon tried to figure out what was wrong on their end. That's after something like a 5 week lead time to provision the circuit. I've found phone companies to be glacial in dealing with problems.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
Most people in the US are stunned to realize that broadband access is often cheaper and faster in "foreign countries" with greater penetration. Most of my fellow Americans don't realize that compared to not just the UK, France, and Japan, but places like South Korea, we're getting rooked.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
T1 is not the same as DSL.
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.
From the "I'd rather post to /. and have the editors post this topic than enter it in google" dept:
i ve
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).
I have a few customers with T1s, and they're paying about six times what they'd pay for my company's wireless service (which would be a faster connection to boot). Part of that is the fact that I have to pay the telco for that T1, obviously, but even without that they're still paying a LOT more than they would otherwise.
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.
The T1 I purchased in 1996 was $2000 roughly from Sprint. Of that $600 was GTE/Verizon's charge for the loop (2 pair). In 1999 I upgraded to a pair of T1 circuits (bonded) the cost was $2300 total, with $300 per loop to Verizon roughly. Then we split our connection and the Sprint T1 of 2002 cost $975 with $180 of that for the Verizon local loop. So the T1 cost has been dropping. But now the product is not in as much demand. In 2005 when we were moving our ISP to a place where bandwidth was cheap (10-60 USD per megabit/sec depending on the provider we'd chose, we reneted space plus got bandwidth and lost the overhead for the redundant power and HVAC (bundled with the space)), then Sprint offered $655 for a T1.
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.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
You want to know why T1 lines are so expensive? Because the idiots with whom you try to talk to just want you to give them money, they don't even bother to haggle on the price.
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?
Saying that T1 prices haven't changed is crazy. Of course they have changed! 7 years ago my company was paying over $1000 per month for half a t1 (before broadband was really available). Since then we've gone to full T1 for $800 and now a dual bonded T1 at 3mb up and down is at that price. Speakeasy has full T1 for $300 per month. Of course its more expensive as its a guaranteed service , a loop must be brought to your location, and equipment like the dsu is spendy. But saying that the price hasn't changed is ridiculous. The price has changed more than broadband prices in my opinion.
Is that DS-1s are highly flexible. You can provision a DS-1 a number of different ways. For example you could do 4 channels for data (256k) 12 for voice, and 6 as a private link to another office. Well, the hardware on the back end for all that costs money. That's there regardless of if you want it or not. If not, it's not a DS-1 line. Same reason ISDN is expensive. It's not the exact same and isn't as many channels, but it is a similar technology. Even if all you want an ISDN line for is 128k Internet, you are still getting everything else that one implies, which is quite a lot (a BRI ISDN line is two digital phone lines with all the features).
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.
A T1 is expensive for the same reason that a CD in a record store (if you can find one) is expensive. It's expensive because the legacy phone companies are having trouble adjusting to the business models of the twenty first century.
[Insert pithy quote here]
A man was complaining about his life to his clergyman.
"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."
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Among the comments made above, T1's are also Full Duplex and synchronous. That is you get full bandwidth going both ways at the same time, ie: you can upload at 1.5mb/sec while at the same time download at 1.5mb/sec. With DSL/Cable you can only be uploading or download at any particular instant.
I work at a large ISP, and a T1 , (which by the way is a fantasy name, its actually just a DSL line.) costs more than said DSL for one reason and one reason only: S.L.A. You are not paying big for bandwidth, taxes, or anything other than the fact that theres a contract that states that when it goes down, it gets fixed in a timely manner. No such provision is taken for DSL.
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
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 $200,000,000 of your money without delivering what they promissed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Because they can get away with charging you for it.
In most first world countries, you can get 8-10 Gbps for about one-quarter what we pay here.
But, also, we still have no adapted our long distance rates, and you have to realize the firms that provide these services lose money on parts of the business while making money on the other parts.
This is also why drugs and medical care costs twice as much here as in Canada.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'll give you South Korea and Japan, but the UK? Surely you're joking. In the UK, 8Mb/s DSL is screaming fast, and the upload speed sucks so hard that it's typically not even advertised. On the other hand, large chunks of the US are getting FTTH lit up right now.
Upload speed
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.
While there is some truth to the comments about service levels and contention, the #1 reason why telcos charge big bucks for T1s is because they can. They have local monopolies and they aren't afraid to charge monopoly prices when they know that their customers have little choice about the matter. Look at the pricing games that they played with ISDN in the USA. They priced it dirt cheap when it was a component of Centrex, a product that was being heavily promoted. The same ISDN service was far more expensive when it was unbundled from Centrex. You shouldn't expect telco prices to obey the normal rules of supply and demand. Technology has made it much cheaper to provision a T1, when compared to the early days of digital transmission systems. Rarely, if ever, are those cost savings passed on to the customer. Just look at your phone bill, and the obscene prices that they charge for optional features and in-state long distance calls. When some customers discovered that they could bypass the telco's extortionate rates by leasing dry pairs (alarm circuits) and providing their own hardware, the telcos were quick to stop offering dry pairs to their customers.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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."
Actually Cablevision's (Optimum Online) response time seems to be about one day. The reason to get a T1 is because you can only use about 10% upstream on a cable connection before they get pissed. So in terms of pricing, a T1 is actually worth the price/bandwidth for sustained use.
When I bought my first T1 back in '99, it was about $1200 per month. It was from Shore.Net (now Primus), and it replaced a more expensive 256k circuit from UUnet. In 2001, I bought a second T1 from Sprint for about $950. Nowadays, I buy them for my clients (usually from Speakeasy) for around $400 or less. I'd say that's a pretty big price drop. A dual bonded T1 (as another poster mentioned) is under $800 - well lower than a single T1 cost a few years ago.
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.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The upload speed comments are amusing, as I regularily exceed 200 kB/s upload speeds with my cable modem, and 1MB/s down. That is above a T1 easily, outbound, and not even comparable outbound. This is in Canada, via Shaw Cablesystems. I'd imagine the primary difference for a T1 these days would be the SLA.
My cable costs me $20 more than it did 6 years ago, though it's been the same price for the past two years. They also charge installation now (100$, yikes!) that used to be free.
It also used to come with free basic cable but not any more. I don't know where this OP is living, but I can only assume it's not in America.
The Farewell Tour II
Back in the days of 300bps modems, someone had a 1200 semi-half-duplex modem.
It went 1200 in the fast direction, with something small like 50bps in the other direction.
The fun part was you could "turn the line around." One side could talk fast the other could o n l y s p e a k r e a l l y s l o w.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
These are two very different animals. Some comparisons between T1 and DSL:
More expensive infrastructure / Dedicated vs. Shared Transport
T1: Two copper pairs, NIUs, Repeaters, DCS, SONET muxes, fixed bandwidth per-circuit TDM infrastructure
DSL: One copper pair, DSLAM, ATM Switches, shared-bandwidth ATM infrastructure
To give you an idea, T1 hand-off to the aggregation device might be done on the DS-3 or OC-3 level. One DS-3 card can only ever hope to handle 28 T-1s because each T1 circuit has a dedicated 1/28th portion of that DS-3.
With DSL, the hand-off might be an ATM DS-3 or OC-3 with several hundreds of DSL subscribers attached with no bandwidth guarantees.
DSL is also not guaranteed to be available in all locations. T1 is almost universally available through use of repeaters.
Dedicated vs. Shared Internet Access
T1: Almost universally sold as "Dedicated Internet Access" (DIA).
DSL: Almost universally sold as no-guarantee "up to Xmbps" service.
Latency
T1: Low latency
DSL: Can often be very high due to cell interleaving (buffering/scrambling for x ms. that increases chance of error correction recoveries) which may be enabled universally to extend service to customers far from CO.
Typical Support
T1: "It's Christmas day, but we'll have someone working on this within two hours."
DSL: "We'll have someone working on this within two business days."
Terms and Conditions
T1: Do anything you'd like, as long as it's not illegal.
DSL: Usually a laundry list of: You cannot resell service, run servers, use excessive bandwidth, etc.
Some providers with business DSL offerings offer higher support levels and less restrictive T&C at a much higher cost than residential DSL.
There are several more things I could go into (single standard vs. many standard; availability of business-grade CPE; disparity in upstream bandwidth; SLAs; uses other than DIA; etc.), but this should be enough to show you some of the general differences.
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.
that the telecom industry was supposed to lay fiber optics to every business, school, and house, and they received tax breaks and other incentives to do so (1990s). they did only a portion of what they promised, and pocketed the cash/perks. remember when the clinton administration promised high speed internet everywhere? it's been slashdotted before too, though i don't have the time to search. if there were fiber optics everywhere (truly everywhere) like there's supposed to be, it would be very cheap.
not only is time travel possible, it's irrelevant.
As others have noted, it's common to have an SLA for the full bandwidth of the T1.
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.
Perhaps he can provide faster nudity.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You're paying for the guy on the phone, when the circuit goes down, to say "yessir, it'll be up in less than 10 minutes". And mean it.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
I blame it on the whole net neutrality fight. They charge for the T1's because they CAN, they know that if someone needs to send a lot of content then they are a content provider [ read business ] and will pay the money to be able to deliver their content. They can make up the money they lose by selling DSL that gives 1.5-6M (yes that's 1.5 guaranteed), by overcharging the providers, and they want to continue this, they are selling bandwidth too cheap, then they cry that the providers, which are paying 20 times more for the same amount of bandwidth need to pay more, so the telco gets to be the hero to the end customer by giving cheap net access, and they get to have the providers like youtube and google pay for it all.
As for speed, you must bear in mind that the TOP speeds for a cable modem or xDSL line are comparable to a T1 line, but an optical T1 line can be uprated to an optical T3 line - or even a T4 line. (T2 and T4 lines are considered "teleco-only" but they do indeed exist.)
There are times a cable modem will run at the same speed as a 56K traditional modem - or slower. The traditional modem will be cheaper, not because of the speed you are running it at, but because of the speed you CAN run it at. The maximum potential is a function of the grade of the hardware used. Better grade hardware can always be run at slower speeds, but will still cost a lot simply because they are higher grade.
Frankly, I'd love it if I could afford a direct O8 connection to my home. But there's no possible way I could afford an O8, even if I only ever ran it at DSL speeds.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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 am astonished, nay, embarrassed, that so many posts here don't seem to know what a T1 is. If you are ever getting less than 1.54 Mbps on your T1 (not burstable) you are getting ripped off. Try calling your DSL or Cable provider and complaining about that! Back on topic; I seem to remember cable always costing $36 and my T1 has gone from $850 down to $500, so I don't understand how anyone can think that T1s have not dropped in price.
Are upload speeds of at least 1.5 megabits/sec usually available to home users?
Is it sustainable? Can you run at 200kBps for weeks on end without pissing them off? Cuz I can get that speed too, for a few days at a time.
Not every t-1 is copper supplied. Here at the library our t1 is fiber. We have Fiber connecting us to the verizon co. Then we have equipment that converts the fiber to 3 t-1's. Cablevision up till they got their metro ethernet up was also doing t1's the same way via fiber. I can get a 30/5 optimum online conenction that so far isnt capped for $60 dollars a month.
If the t-1 is more then $1000 a month I can get a 10/10 fiber conenction right to my computer room for $1000 a month through lightpath. I am hoping that t-1s now are under $1000
There are several reasons why T1 is more expensive than DSL for equivalent data rates. As so many have mentioned, there's a guaranteed pipe that can be sub-allocated as the user sees fit. The big reason, though, is because they can get away with it and many T1 customers don't have any other choice. DSL has serious distance restrictions, while T1 can be 'repeatered' and can thus reach locations that DSL can't
The irony is that so far ISPs in the US have been trying to squeeze customers for every penny they can by charging high prices for slow connections but the strategy backfired big time. The big ISPs thought that the internet would grow incredibly rapidly (even faster than it has so far!), and bandwidth demands would increase exponentially thus increasing their profits as they experienced rapid growth and became quite powerful. They prepared for this, they spent a lot of money installing infrastructure (laying fiber etc) to be in position to take advantage of the expected growth and other emerging opportunities (like delivering on demand HD content over their pipes (or are they tubes? I'm so confused, Ted Stevens save me!)).
:)
However as all the dark fiber, busted, sold or merged ISPs, and those who nearly went bankrupt (level 3) makes evident, things didn't work out exactly how they planned. The reason? The high prices they charged for "broadband" choked not only the growth of the internet but stalled the demand for bandwidth--which is how they make money. The US, by far the wealthiest country isn't even in the top 10 of the list of countries according to broadband subscribers per capita; the reason? As any geek will tell you, countries like Japan, South Korea, Sweeden and others which have higher broadband adoption rates per capita have access to the internet at speeds and prices almost unfathomable to those of us in the US paying almost $50/month for sub 1Mb/s DSL that doesn't even work half the time.
The ISPs are now realizing that they can't charge as much as they would like. The ISPs NEED to make very fast broadband (10Mb+, which is still, very slow compared to Japan etc) cheap and easy to get. Charging high prices for broadband makes access to the internet very exclusive, so instead of netflix being a company that, from the start, offered on demand movies, they just offered a list and sent you DVDs on loan through the MAIL, bypassing the ISPs tube thingys and a HUGE potential source of revenue. $25/month for 56k was neat, but in the end it's useless, bad for buisness and worse for ISPs.
It's not all bad though, the ISPs at least seem to have realized this and in many cases have decreased prices drastically. Cox used to charge $50/month for 3Mb/s cable, recently they bumped up the speed (for a second time) to 12Mb/s for the same price, despite inflation, despite increased demand, despite the weak dollar. Verizon is rolling out FioS at even higher speeds. The internet is responding in kind...just as the ISPs predicted so long ago. Netflix now offers streaming DVDs, so does itunes. Youtube is a huge success. These are things that never would have happened a few years ago, because they would have failed. All that fiber ISPs planted so long ago is finally starting to get used, companies like level 3 are much healthier and I can't wait for even faster speeds.
The real question seems to be "why can't I get a freaking static ip address and a decent upload?".
The answer is that theres no market for that. Many areas in the country now have really good infrastructure (fibre to the house etc) that could easily provide the equivalent of a T1 to every house. The place I live in (KC) actually will offer service a good deal better than a T1 for a good deal cheaper for instance.
The reality though is they could probably provide me that service for whatever I'm paying right now. They won't do it though because it wouldn't attract many more home users. If they did do it though all the business users would instantly switch to the far cheaper service.
Simple market economics. You could say it sucks but in reality if they couldn't charge those business users extra the quality of service the home users could get would probably suffer heavily due to less investment in infrastructure.
Well, I'm certainly no expert when it comes to "real" Internet access such as T1 connections, etc.
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?
My cable connection ($60/month) is 8-12 Mbps down, 1.5 Mbps up.
But it's not guaranteed. If my service goes down, I call and complain, and they get someone out to fix it within a couple days. If I'm *REALLY* lucky, they'll be out same-day.
When my T-1 at work goes down, not only is it a big deal, but when we call and complain, we have it fixed within the hour. If I'm really UN-LUCKY, it will take the full 60 minutes.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
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.
Of course many people have noted that an enterprise level internet connection with SLAs is going to be pricier than a household connection.
But the submitter is also asking, more or less, why do we still use DSL, 2 or 4 pair copper to the home?
Money is the answer. Anything that involves rolling out new infrastructure will be a huge investment, especially if you have one of those picky governments that expects industry to treat customers equally. Who's going to pay for that? I can only imagine what the cost would be like. Now, since internet is treated like a commodity instead of a utility, no government under those conditions can mandate the provision of high speed internet, so it has to be profitable. So it would cost a lot, lot more. And 99% of users wouldn't pay.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
I've had modems, dsl, frame relay, and now T1. At my house, the T1 is more reliable than the electricity, and I can use the full bandwidth in both directions all the time, with low latency. That was not the case with anything else.
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)
Other than that, they charge what the market will bear. Quit paying for them, use alternatives, and things will change. Perhaps they're trying to kill off the T1 altogether, or regulatory price changes are too much trouble to apply for and complete.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
We have 1 T1, 2 business class service cable modems, and (2) business class FiOS. I think we pay $99 each for the cable, $800 for the T1, and (I believe) $199 for each FiOS. The FiOS has upload speeds of 5MB+. It doesn't cost anywhere near a T1 and it's far faster.
As others have pointed out, T1's are just pipes that connect your site to a central office somewhere -- your internet connection or WAN connectivity is then usually delivered by a Frame Relay or ATM network. That's old technology that's expensive to provision and expensive to maintain, unless you're a huge customer.
The big new thing as far as I know is fiber links from the telco CO to the customer site. In many cases, you can get a 10MB point to point ethernet link for less than a 768k fractional T1.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I just renewed my contract with Sprint and the price is about half (combined with local loop) what I was paying three years ago.
1. Population Density.
If I have to pull 5 miles of fiber from the switch to a building to deliver an OC-48 to 1 customer, then extend that back through a SONNET with 3 pass-through points....thats pretty expensive. And for the customer it ties them to one company...
Now if you look at most Urban areas in the UK, France, Spain, etc there are a lot more public switches, tons of MAN setups, etc...not to mention the fact that wireless is a lot easier when you have a smaller geographical area.
2. Regulation + MA Bells
Fixed lines prices, taxes, etc all can hold back expansion of networks. ILECs still have power in the US. Even though Verizon and AT&T are buying everything they still can't consolidate all their networks and unify on new technology because that would be viewed as an unfair advantage to other companies.
These suggestions may not be practical, but they at least explain why there is a market for upload bandwidth. Generally speaking, if everyone only paid for upload, and didn't pay for download, the economics of a non-P2P Internet would work quite well. It's like the post office, where the sender of the letter pays postage, and the receiver gets it for free. Every bit is paid for, since every bit has a source(the payer) and a destination. End users would have low prices, and therefore have more incentive to browse the net. Last-mile providers can build an infrastructure which exploits asymmetric connections. Big traffic web sites end up financing the cost of pushing bits around on the Internet (and since they are pretty much charged for the amount of content they produce, they have an incentive to keep that number down, leading to more efficient usage of bandwidth). Backbone ISPs should have an easier time pushing the bits downstream. Also, downstream providers have more incentive to find peering agreements and avoid the backbones... leading to better load balancing.
For big users of P2P technology, costs shift around. Much of the cost of Internet services is, ultimately, subsidized by advertising. This works well in the above model. With P2P, end users upload a lot more, and will have to directly face the cost of bandwidth themselves.. instead of relying on big-traffic web sites to generate a cash flow coming out of the advertiser's pockets. I'm curious to see how this will play out, with P2P TV on the way, and the last-mile providers increasingly incensed by this.
He's spot on... the reason for the pricing is because they are tariffed.
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
First, a technical detail. T1 lines send their digital signals over lines with high-current, constant DC power. Without a correspondingly high load resistance, the net effect can send hundreds of DC volts through whatever gets plugged in. Don't believe me? Feel free to stop by my data center, lick your finger, and run it across some T1 cross-connects. That's how a lot of old phone company techs look for vacant pairs on trunk lines. It's a lot faster than busting out a multi-tester.
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.
All these posts are completely missing the point and not understanding at all how T1 (voice or data) pricing is determined. This is not a technical or economic issue at all (that would be too logical). It is simply tariffs. The PUC decides what LECs and CLECs can charge. CLECs can charge less (to improve competition), but your LEC has a fixed price that it *must* charge for T1 in your area. There is *no* getting around this. It really comes down to room full of old white men deciding the price.. Here is an example for at&t in California.
i les/CAPL11PLM1.pdf#page=4
http://serviceguide.att.com/tariff/business/ext/f
These are the prices *period* (few exceptions for special state contracts such as CALNET)
That depends on your location. If you are close to the central office, DSL is an alternative to T1. But the range of DSL is limited to a couple miles (varies
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/ 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.
What college do I have to go to in order to learn how to stuff 8,000 consumers in to a single BRA? I'm not sure how you do it but it sounds like an awesome experience anyway.
When connecting sites together, especially where voice services are used, T1s work better because you can usually get someone to guarantee that your packets will be delivered in less than 50ms, and someone will come out and fix it quickly when it goes down.
This may not be a problem in the future as Verizon opens its FIOS network to "private" point to point services. Verizon knows that this will eventually cannibalize its old network. That's fine with Verizon since they need to share that old network with other telcos. FIOS, on the other hand, is a protected network. They can keep FIOS as their own product.
Sure, Internet T1 circuits are a waste. We recently got rid of a $350/mo internet T1 and replaced it with a $99.00/mo FIOS 20/5 Mbps circuit with static IP. Verizon does not guarantee uptime, or latency, but we really don't care that much for internet traffic.
-ted
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
I had a discussion about this with my Boss. What it really comes down to is Money. Cable and DSL are available across the street at the residential homes, but amazingly not available at our office. Why? Because more money can be squeezed out of a business than out of a residential unit. Most residences would opt for the slower, cheaper version, but a business needs access all the time. The company doling out both has an opportunity (and often a monopoly) and can make more money.
"I get 300KB downloads almost all the time."
Pfft... that's nothing, I get like 700MB all the time, mostly distro ISOs.
Ahh, you mean per second? Would that be KB or Kb?
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
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!
Secondly, because they want to make money. If you want a "managed" service, you're their bread and butter. Note that the same T1 line, if you were to use it for long distance instead of data, would only cost you a tiny fraction if you agreed to use at least a certain amount of long distance. One of my friends who used to work for Qwest said that DSL support techs would say "We'll notify a technician", and the tech would only think of handling it if he was devoid of any other work AND completely bored. They don't want to keep DSL (or cable) on the same quality, they want to make what they can from those who *need* reliability.
Third, it's a small package, and you pay more per unit for small packaging. As an example, where I'm at, a point-to-point T1 costs $250 per month, or about $160 per megabit. On the other hand, a point-to-point T3 costs $1200 per month, or about $27 per megabit. That's between two buildings with on-premesis fiber, so no termination fees. If the provider has to pay someone else for termination, that can increase the cost in a hurry.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
It's tarrifs and SLA quality. Mostly regulated tarriffs, which were dodged in large part by the ethernet/DSL/cable modem services, and so have likely outlived their usefulness.
The overbooking ratio is a completely separate matter that a lot of people just don't seem to consider when pricing out ISP lines. WHile cable has two different types of "overbooking" really -- the local collisions and the backbone uplink -- it's still basically the same thing minus being a bit harder to diagnose from the customer end when service is choppy. One should always consider both the "last mile" bandwidth and the uplink bandwidth to a peering location/total bandwidth of all customers.
(Though frankly when I left WAN networking a few years ago I was having my doubts about whether the "gold standard" still applied to T1s when it came to SLA. Seemed it was starting to be the case that only DS3s got taken seriously anymore.)
Someone had to do it.
I had a RoadRunner Business Class connection for a number of months. They gave me the cable equivelant of a dedicated line (a dedicated segment of their 1 GHz drop), and 6 Mbit/s down and 2 Mbit/s up for $300 a month. What's more, even before I had their business class connection, whenever I had a problem with connectivity, I could call up the local office and within 30 minutes to an hour, they'd have someone out fixing the line. When I upgraded to business class, they gave me a number I could call 24/7; I never needed to, but it was nice to know they offered it. Their service was good whether I had a residential connection or a business class; I only upgraded to business class because I needed the extra upstream bandwidth for work.
I was honestly surprised that a T1 still cost more than the business class connection, which was significantly faster -- seems as much as people complain about the cost of cable (TV), they're very reasonable when it comes to commercial internet connections. At any rate, if you'd asked me 12 years ago, I'd have agreed with author, that the tech savy would have access to inexpensive fiber or T1/ISDN lines by now. Granted, newer, better solutions have come along for the average consumer, but it still perplexes me why T1 and particularly ISDN lines are not only still leased, but why they still come with such a hefty premium.
I'm guessing you're on the western end of the country. From what I've heard, service in Ontario, under the iron fist of Rogers, is comparable to the worst of what you see in the US.
I'm curious ... are those really T1s per se? To the point other posters have made, true point-to-point T1 lines are a somewhat outdated -- and hence expensive -- technology. Is the product that Speakeasy is selling you truly a T1 using that class of technology, or is it something like Frame Relay with enforced, guaranteed bandwidth? I know I was sold something that was called a T1 in the mid-1990s that was actually Frame Relay. To a certain extent, to me as a customer it made no difference. But if someone is really shopping for something that has to be a real, honest-to-gosh T1 line, maybe the price hasn't gone down.
Breakfast served all day!
In that comparisation a T3 would be caviar; the more expensive kind; and DSL would be the more familiar smelly trout..
Although I got to say an E1 (the European equivalent of the T1 but with 30 channels instead of 24) and we only had a few interruptions only. Started with UUNet, went to Worldcom and Verizon and still quite satisfied.
Since the deal went from Worldcom to Verizon the customer service has dropped fatally; the UUNet engineers used to listen to our problem and help us to get a better solution without ripping our pants while Verizon is money-hungered. Nowadays it's only pay-up-or-be-gone instead of the normal "helpful" way..
It's not only with them; it happens everywhere; if customer is king the salesman is sure kaiser while it used to be the other way around.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
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.
AT&T aDSL is California is cheaper.
768 Kbps = $15
1.5 Mbps = $20
3.0 Mbps = $25
6.0 Mbps = $35
Contract not required.
"1.544Mbit connection" isn't the kind of thing that sounds expensive, but "wire that somehow involves the phone company" sure does.
Fuckin' A, I bet I can afford a few megabits per second, but I'm not sure I can afford to run my 56k USR Courier.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I pay around $57.50 per month including modem rental for optical fiber to my home.
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.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
...from the telco to your distribution panel in your neighborhood, even if its' ethernet/PPPoE over fiber that you get on your end.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
...with achieving adoption of this proposal. Namely, that it's an intelligent idea which would likely be extremely effective at solving network problems and increasing the usability and efficiency of the Internet overall.
;) People hate anything which actually solves problems. After all, if they didn't have the perpetual activity of merely *pretending* to solve problems, (while in fact merely holding them at bay) what on Earth would they do with their time? What would they get paid for?
Nobody is going to tolerate that, you realise.
T1s are expensive because they are regulated and have little competition. The phone companies that offer them, segment the market with product offerings and then don't lower the products price much over the years. They "lower the price" by offering new services. Metro Ethernet for example is offered by phone companies to significantly undercut T1 local loops in most markets on a per meg basis. DSL is a subsitute good for T1's. It is an example of a new product that is priced lower as the old product is held at the higher price. The phone company also just offers "NO QOS" on DSL and thus keeps the business market using the much higher local transport option. As a technical trivia point: T1's use HDSL as the way to send the signals down copper. So they are also "DSL" DSL uses other higher speed variants such as ADSL to send the signals. CLECs compete directly in the T1 space but they use services (UNE's) from the phone company that are sold to them at a discount from the rate the phone company sells the service for - so there is a price floor to the service. Enough buildings are "lit" in big cities to create lower cost access to compete with T1's but they end up pricing "under" the T1 without any competiton to keep driving down the rates. Most of what I have referred to here is "transport" getting bits from point a to point z. Most of you are users of IP services and view the "price" of transport service as a bundled service offering, that includes IP Web access (DIA). DIA has dropped from over $1000 per meg (when I was at UUNet) to under $10 per meg wholesale today in big quantities. So a 100 fold reduction in price. So - what to do if you want cheaper internet than a T1? Buy a DSL line and a cable modem and connect both services to your router. For under $125 MRC you will have 5 to 10 megs of high reliability IP DIA that will run at a better QOS than a T1 for 1/2 to 1/5 the cost. 5 times the bandwidth, 1/2 the cost - the same reliability... what more can a business ask for?
I work for a telco, and while I'm not privy to the marketing decisions that go in to the whole thing, I can give the reasoning as I've always seen it.
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.
Not quite.
I work for a CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier). We have very few tariffs that apply to us regarding the prices we charge our customers. (Mostly, tariffs affect us in terms of what we have to pay ILECs [Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier] for their wholesale or finished services.) We have great flexibility in how we price our products.
The price of a T1 is the result of a mixture of outside costs (leasing the local loop, peering arrangements, CPE, etc.), internal infrastructure costs, overhead costs (including people, buildings, debt payments, etc.), competitive pricing, and profit. If you are innovative, you can find ways to drive the local loop costs (for example) down significantly - can you say HDSL2/4 on short loops? The customer still gets all the functions of a T1.
In determining the price for a given service, you look at the larger picture, sometimes discounting some service because you are also getting other business from that customer that is more profitable. In other words, the price is not etched in stone or determined by tariff - it's based on many factors, including making enough profit to keep the doors open another year.
The fact is that T1s just don't cost as much (either to buy or to sell) as they used to.
I think T1's have a very steady latency of about ~5ms (end to end) of the T1 circuit (yes, yes, I know there are other factors). Also they can send and recieve the full 1.54 Mbps in both directions with out affecting layer 2 latency. They use two pairs of wire opposed to 1 pair for DSL. (Waring! Uncomfirmed!......) I think DSL must use some sort of TDMA scheme to move data pseudo full-duplex, where T1 has a send pair and a recieve pair. I do know that if I max out the DSL connection (upstream) the latency gets really messed up, where the T1 seems to be more steady and predictable. I sell DSL, Fibre and T1's where my office is at a fraction of the cost of what the Telco sells it for (T1's, not the DSL - the DSL is too competitive. I have a fair number of T1 clients despite the nature of businesses in the area and only word-of-mouth advertising. There is still a place for T1's today and for the next few years. It's difficult to explain the cost difference to potential clients - they just don't get it. I feel I'm offering them a great price for a T1 (often 1/3rd the normal price) but they still think it's high. Another note, T1's have a longer reach, and the telco's support installing T1 repeaters. DSL repeater products exist but they are not widly used. Basically, if I was a geek and fibre wasn't an option... I'd want a DSL for my surfin' and a T1 for my servin'. Bonded T1 is nice too. Setup a router between the DSL and T1 so when you are trying to access IP's on your T1 circuit from your DSL, your packets don't traverse the Internet (wasting your bandwidth). I **hate** hearing people bitch about their DSL prices and speeds on slashdot. DSL is generally a cheap-o service. You get what you pay for. I used to spend about ~$1900/month when I wasn't an ISP and subscribed to fibre from another ISP. I have a small company, and don't have a big budget or anything. I did have a business case for it, yet it was still (and still is) a lot of coin for an operation the size of my company (I have 4 guys working for me) but did (and do) I ever sleep better at night. The SLA's and reliability of the fibre are the best option if you can afford it. Our building got hit by lightning two years ago - did that ever screw stuff up (damaged a lot of equipment) - yes everything was well grounded. The fiber was completely unaffected (glass, not metal!!!) another big benefit... plus fiber is (typically) not affected by rain. I do know that the fibre circuit is a bunch of fiber cables 'fused' together, essentially one long continous piece of glass from my business to the telco CO office. (no connections to go faulty as a result of the fusing) - unless there is a backhoe in the neighbourhood - today there was one and my skin crawled. The other thing is, the telcos definately charge more for T1 circuits as they are geared strictly for business - I do not know of anyone at all (friends, business contacts, etc) that has a T1 at home (except me!-didn't mean to be a show off here!!!) - it's too much money. T1's here come with a 4 hour MTTR (mean time to repair) where DSL service for business has 48 hour MTTR, and residential has 72 hour MTTR. If you're at home (and you're not a geek) you don't really need to send a lot of data normally, so DSL is a fitting option. Everyone (generally) seems to be a consumer, not a publisher. Yes, I know there are some that do need to send quickly however, I have to say, you are (presently) a very few. Also, as far as the MTTR, if you DSL goes down at home, usually it's not the end of the world, but if it goes out at your work!, wow, no e-mail and the office is in chaos. Bonded DSL is another option, take 2 dsl circuits, aggregate their upstream (and downstream) and you pretty much have the upstream of a T1! The best bonded DSL solutions are the ones your ISP can offer you, the do-it-yourself layer 3 with some 'magic' router stuff doesn't work very well for most apps, (like vpn). By the way, if you're going to troll this post (looking for flaws in what I've said) I'm not trying to write a
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 and AMI. 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 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?
Frequently Canada has one over on those of us living Down Under the 49th parallel (beer is better for one thing) but...looks like it sucks to be Canadian. I have 6 MB/s down ADSL from AT&T here in Chicago for what would be CND $33.50/month. I've had essentially 100% uptime last 12 months. So you your telco is charging more for half the bandwidth.
I would avoid telling your customers any more about US rates if I were you.....
Thanks for that... it is amazing how much crap I had to plow thru on this thread just to get to a coherent answer.
However, in many cases, a carrier like MCI doesn't own their own infrastructure, at least not down to the building premise... that's owned by a Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) and the LEC charges a regulated price to the carriers such as MCI and then hands-off the signal to them. MCI is passing that cost marked-up, plus their fee for whatever access you purchase (voice or data), on to you.
You are correct in that this regulated price is fought-for by the telco lobby, but this is well supported in government because of the perception that we can't have "ma-bell", whoever it is where you live, going out of business because they can't afford to maintain their infrastructure.
T-1 from your LEC in and out of the same central office is surprisingly inexpensive compared to the thousands of dollars you pay to get it beyond that... so if you're connecting two offices served out of the same CO with a T-1, you pay local-loop for each end of the circuit to the LEC and nothing else; no mileage, no carrier, or any other fees (outside of taxes of course) and you end up with a dedicated 1.544Mb/s and if you want, you can push mayonnaise through it... it's yours to do with as you will as long as you adhere to whatever federal/state/local telecommunications regulations are present for where you live. In most cases, you cannot buy a T-1 like that from anyone but the LEC, because they own the copper in the ground from premise to premise; that's called a monopoly. But that's also what maintains the price... that copper in the ground to your premise costs huge amounts of money to establish and maintain... rights of way need to be established, the street has to be torn-up to put it in, and the cable-plant has to be maintained (ala phone-truck guys). This is what drives the regulations that spawn tariffs. As far as the LEC is concerned, they have to charge an amount that allows them to maintain business, and it degenerates to a public services issue because ultimately, the issue doesn't boil down to your IP/Internet service... it boils down to voice service which is considered a basic service and part of a national infrastructure plan; all this appeals to lawmakers who help prop this system up because people are gonna get pissed when they can't pick up the phone and hear a dial-tone.
Even if you purchase some other service that rides on T-1, like frame-relay, you're going to pay the local-loop to the CO, plus the port and CIR charges to connect to the network; it's those charges that make a frame-relay T1 so expensive. While with a shared-services network like frame-relay you have the whole, unsubscribed T-1 to the central office, the actual thru-put you're going to be able to push is determined by the port speed and CIR you choose (when you establish the service) once you get into the network cloud.
Frankly, I'd prefer it if they'd deregulate the whole thing a let competition have a chance. Where I live, I can get Vonage, or I can get phone service from my cable provider, or I can buy a traditional POTS from a company called Windstream, which used to be Alltel. I can't get a POTS line from anyone but Windstream because they own the copper going down my street. I don't use any of it... I use my cell phone instead.
A T1 line is a dedicated line specifically rated for carrying the bandwidth you pay for. In contrast, a DSL line is an ordinary phone line over which convoluted DSP magic is performed to squeeze as many bits as possible into it. Meanwhile, a cable line is a shared pipe.
T1 outages must be responded to within an hour. DSL and cable outages, God knows when.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
First: ADSL, SDSL and T1 are related. T1 used to be called HDSL (1948). Check the rear site of that T1 router.
:)
Second: ADSL and SDSL in essence have nothing to do with overbooking or internet. It's what the industry has made of it. They wanted to produce a standard el cheapo product voor the masses. Based on the widely available twisted pair, they made a standard, home-to-internet (non-point-to-point) xDSL flavor with overbooking.
Third: ADSL and SDSL come in flavors. From 1/500 overbooked to 1/1 overbooking. From a 'we will fix it within 5 workdays or will try to' to 'fixed within 2 hours' SLA's. Just show 'm the money.
Fourth: DSL comes with guaranteed bandwith if you have the right provider that can service you with the right QoS. Check the ATM QoS for DSL: UBR and UBR+ suck, VBR-NRT is better, while VBR-RT is very nice and CBR is the best available. I mean: on a 1/4 1Mb SDSL connection with VBR-RT quality, you have 1/4th guaranteed, no matter how busy the hinterland is. That's in the QoS standard.
So, in short, a 2.3Mb SDSL connection with Gold (24x7, 2 hours) fixing guarantee and CBR quality is basically a good old T1 connection. And yes: it will cost you, dearly
Way back when, my girlfriend and I had a killer deal on a point-to-point (as opposed to the inferior frame relay) T1 in the mid 90s to my house in Arizona. It was about $1200 a month (including charges from the ISP) when our mortgage was about $1050 a month. Normal commercial customers were paying about $2k/month at the time. Point-to-point means that there is an actual wire that carries your data, and only your data, from, um, point to point, with a guaranteed bandwidth. A frame relay T1 is a wire that goes into and comes out of a "cloud" and does not have the same guaranteed max bandwidth.
In order to set up a T1 you also needed a couple of relatively expensive pieces of equipment - a "modem" to convert the signal to a serial connection, and an honest to goodness router with a serial connection to turn it into Ethernet. We sprang for an Adtran and a slightly used 2500 for a total of something under $3000. Getting the line installed was an adventure that took months (pretty close to a year I think) and included watching people splice cables in the alley behind our house, then watching them splice them again later. Our phone company at the time was US "Worst" (now "Qworst") and several times we had the experience of having a "service date" a few weeks in the future, and on that date watching a couple of guys arrive, who after a few minutes told us "we don't do this," and leave. Eventually we wound up with a temporary "drop" cable between the splice box and our house, which was supposed to be buried, but never was. The cable was cut a couple of times when a freeway was built between us and our ISP. It was kind of an adventure.
There were few options. A 56k cost several hundred a month and was, well, a 56k.
We hosted a handful of web sites for friends for a few years, including stonehenge.com. Eventually that became a nuisance for all concerned, and the T1 became all ours.
Around 2000 we replaced the T1 with a couple of 256k symmetric DSLs that we bonded with an HP laptop used as a router. They were vastly cheaper ($200/month) and not all that much different. Also, they were from our cable company, and not Qworst.
The DSLs took months to get set up, but that's another story.
Anytime you are on the phone with the telephone company, and you hear someone utter the word "kilofeet," you should know that you are about to spend a lot of money, and/or wait many months.
Just a note.
Its expensive because you buy a T1 circuit (point to point) from your telco for some large amount per month. Typically you pay an amount that covers BOTH endpoints.
I thought it was because the telco was charging for services they never delivered, charging outrageous fees for the services they do provide and putting the money in their pockets, you know, robbing everyone blind.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Uh, T-Mobile refers to the name of a subsidiary of Deutsche (note spelling) Telekom, not some technology they might use. Roflmao. Europe uses the E-carrier system, which revised and improved the earlier American T-carrier technology, and this has now been adopted by the ITU-T. This is now widely used in almost all countries outside USA, Canada and Japan.
Also, the company name is Deutsche (note spelling) Telekom. All subsidiaries of Deutsche (note spelling again) Telekom, such T-Mobile, T-Com, T-Online and T-Systems have their names prefixed with a T-.
I'm on a stable 10 Mbit up/10 Mbit down line for $7.23 per month.
:)
Downloads are usually quickly around 800-900 KB/s, and popular torrents come to me with 1200 KB/s, apt-get:ing goes in 700 KB/s.
I'm in Sweden
For many parts of the US, telco monopolies stop competition so there is no reason to lower pricing. The data access is usually not so bad price wise for what you get, the local loop is often the expensive part. If you're sitting on top of fiber, are in a large city that actually has competition, then a T1 can start at 199 for a Tier 1. Get outside of the city limits into most of the US real estate and you enter monopolistic telco company territories. Then the loop gets real expensive. Ma Bell was broken up years ago, yet the FCC in the 90s and beyond were more than happy to let the baby bells merge. During Powell's kid's management of the FCC big business ran rampant, and that still continues (Nice political family nepotism, as the Sec of State you can get your kid to run the FCC...) Now we have the monsters of Verizon and SBC/AT&T. If you do business in one of their monopoly areas, you almost always HAVE to use them. For example, I'm in Verizon land. I have some SBC T1s - yet underlying them is Verizon. I have some Sprint T1s, underlying them is Verizon. No matter whom I choose, Verizon has to be involved since they're the monopoly. Until the FCC decides to allow real telco competition we're not going to see rate reductions for a service that has no competition.
Just have a look here - that should explain:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Signal_1
So, T1 (or DS1 here in Europe) is an old technology that multiplexes 24 channels, with 64kbit/second each. In Europe this was implemented via a PRI, which consisted of 24 copper pairs, each transporting 64kbit/s. Having 24 lines from the telekom to your home was expensive and still is. However, it's obsoleted, as nowadays via DSL one can get much higher rates on a copper pair, e.g. SDSL (which is symmetric) has rates up to 2Mbit/second, therefore it's a lot cheaper than T1.
Some stated that bandwidth is guaranteed with T1: That's not true. If a line is overbooked or not is simply based on the contract you have with your provider. Theoretically, one can also build a cheap ASDL-line with guaranteed bandwidth, however in the consumer sector, this is seldom needed.
I have a T1 at work and a 10mbps cable connection at home. The home connection goes down all the time, no reason, just goes down, may be an hour may be longer. The T1 does NOT go down ever, when I unplug the device I get a phone call within 20 minutes letting me know something is wrong. We had a problem years ago when it was first setup and they(tier zero) had verizon at my site on a Sunday afternoon, the same day it went down, it is impossible to do that on your own. The speed is crap compared to the home 10mbps, but it ALWAYS works, so you can use it for stuff like DNS and HTTP that just HAS to be up 24/7.
In the last few months tier zero has been trying to get us to sign up for a 3 year contract at $300/mo, we currently pay $500/mo. so they are desperate for customers! Verizon has been rolling out fios in our area (Long Beach,CA) so I'm waiting until that's ready so I can sign up with verizon.
I run BT 24/7 and I upload @ 800-1000 kBps and I have yet to recieve so much as an email from Shaw. (I have the 25/1 Mbit package for 99/month). As far as I'm concerned, Shaw is a great isp.
Not sure why this person thinks that T1 lines are still expensive. True they do cost more than DSL lines, but I would just like to point out that my T1 line in 2000 cost 1495/mth vs 1750 in 97 or 98 and that nowdays you can get a T1 for around 500/mth which to me seems to be significantly cheaper.
This is in Atlanta, Georgia. Not sure what prices are running in other regions of the country.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
ATT/TCI USED to sell you telephone service via cable. It was a true phone line stuffed down a 64K section of the bandwidth. IOW, it operated just like a single regular T1. channel. If you did not have too many neighbors in the area, you could even pick up a second line. What was nice is that voice quality was the same as a pots. But the QOS was not the same. It was lower due to the inferior routing equipment. Just prior to the comcast buyout, the denver group was working on a VOIP set-up. After the buyout, comcast moved the voip group (and most of the development) to philly and then pushed the development. It took another 4 years,but now they have VOIP over the cable. So what is the diff? The 64K analog call is LOSSY compressed into about 8K and then sent via digital packets over a SHARED connection. That allows you to have as many lines as you want at your home, but you will now suffer from several issues; 1) the quality of voip compression is just acceptable. But try to run an analog fax over it. It has less than a 50% chance of going through. 2) there is a good chance that you will have issues with the routing of the call. You will find difficulty with the routing of the call set-up. comcast makes the initial set-up have just a bit higher priority until established at which time, your call goes up just one more bumb. For customers who are on a busy section of networking, it means that you will have dropped calls, and dropped sections of calls. BTW, if you are comcast and install the service, do yourself a favor and after a week, tell them that you have issues, and what they will do is increase your priority slightly. You will be happy that they do. Now what does the aforementioned mean to you? Remember 9/11? How busy was the net? Monster busy. If you are at comcast (or any shared IP), you will most likely NOT get through to call 911, let alone your friends. With a POTS or a T1, you are going to call 911 and your friends IFF you are in the same CLEC. If you are trying to call through LATAs, then will issues of a fast busy signal (could not get through to the telco on the side), but still have higher priority than does say a comcast ip call. I now have a family with kids. If I have a problem, when I need 911, I want to be able to get through. So we have a POTS line in the house.
I see that you are aussie. Your national phone comapny is Telstra. Your current CEO is Solomon Trujillo. Solly use to run the company that I have worked at (US West). He transfered there after the qwest/uswest merger (the true nightmare that continues). What you have probably seen is that quality of service has gone up, but so has your costs. Solly is old phone company.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
slashdot users makes me want to smoke crack.
I don't know what part of Japan your friends live in or what provider they're on, but my provider and all the providers I checked the last time I checked sell ADSL to the home. And business class (symmetric) connections are expensive. (1.5M/500K for about a tenth the cost of a 1M business connection, and about half the best price I last found in the US for 1.5M/250K ADSL).
End users who might choose a dsl line are less likely to utilize their full bandwidth.
on the other hand, anyone going for a T1 is sure to be in the deal for bandwidth.
hence, providers are grossly overselling dsl and like types of access, but selling T1 and similar services from their real rates.
Read radical news here
http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/defineterm.jht ml?term=DSL
This ofcourse does not take into consideration technology from hatteras, which can give you 5.6mbps per copper pair.
http://www.hatterasnetworks.com/default.aspx?pagen ame=addBandwidthOnDemand
That is 45 megs over 8 copper pairs. The existing copper facilities in most cities have no problem supporting this technology.
There are companies that provide faster than T1 service at better costs using a variety of technologies.
Why arent major telcos offering higher speeds at reasonable rates? Traditionally they have not had too. Customers arent aware of other solutions or are misinformed and continue to accept what the telco offers them. The telcos in turn have not seen a need to invest in better products because their bottom lines are just fine. I find their fiber investments perplexing. Let's invest in a fiber build out that we know wont be profitable for a long time to come and completely ignore that we could fund it exploiting our current copper infrastructure. I dont get it.
If you live in pittsburgh or cleveland there is a company called Expedient that can provide you cost effective bandwidth solutions at better than t1 speeds. ANET in Chicago, and Web United in Miami can do the same. In cincinnati there is a company that does internet over power lines to buildings. People should check their local yellow pages for other providers and ask them what they have to offer. They should also ask other business owners about their ISPs and services to see what is out there.
T1's are old and antiquated... Seriously, you dont have to suffer like that.
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)
The largest component of the cost difference is the SLA. Your T1 goes down on a holiday weekend and someone is there to fix it in a couple of hours. Manpower is very expensive.
I think something people fail to realize is that many short-haul T1's (where you don't need the old school high voltage equipment) are in fact DSL lines! Yes, SDSL, not ADSL, but they are delivered over DSL equipment. You're paying for guaranteed bandwidth, a symmetrical pipe, low latency and jitter, the ability to support TDM services, and an SLA. For the Internet, many people do not need all of that.
I have a "business class" cable modem. The speed is the exact same as my providers "residential" cable modem, and it's provided with the exact same modem over the exact same cable plant. But it's $20/month more. However, when it went out last week I called at 8AM, got a person on the first ring (no IVR, no waiting) who said they would have a tech out before noon on the same day. He was there by 10AM, and had it working by 11AM. The extra $20 was for better service, not upload/download speed service, better customer service.
Very nice technical article, although one thing you missed is that T1 describes the end point signally (24 time slots of x length, etc). DS1 describes the traditional carries-a-T1-on-4-wires that most people think of a T1 as. Small thing really.
But one thing I'm amazed that noone has noticed is that one reason a T1 (or T3, etc) circuit is so expensive: It's a tariffed (read: regulated!) circuit!
Your state utilities board or legislature sets maximum costs for each tariffed circuit, like a phone dial tone line, an alarm circuit, and T1. Therefore, they're high, because the telco petitions for the most expensive possible scenario since they can't modify that price. No reason to lose money anywhere even if you'd make it up on volume!
Newer technologies like DSL, metropolitan ethernet-over-sonnet, FIOS, etc... they're not tariffed. They're priced at whatever level will get them to sell.
The DSL to your house rides copper only to the nearest DSLAM, which might be in the vault just a few blocks away. From there it rides to the CO via fiber (most likely) where it joins the rest of the ATM network. From there it can ride (via ATM) to any ISP in the world, but typically only to ISPs in your state. The ATM links that your cheap-ass consumer DSL rides are highly controlled for QOS and you can guarantee that you are on the lowest tier of service. Your ISP brings their DSL virtual circuits in on an ATM line that is probably also smaller than the total aggregate of DSL virtual circuits that ride in on it. So, yes, your DSL can be 'over subscribed' as it is mostly a logical circuit and not a physical one. You get what you paid for, most of the time, and not more.
I worked for an ISP that had leased several T1 circuits during the dot-com boom from several telcos with differing results.
The first ones were with Earthlink and verizon. The verizon circuit gave us nothing but headaches and their infrastructure support was godawful. Earthlink fared little better and their support was marginal.
We got a Sprint T1 later on down the road and it was like a bright ray of sunshine. Their support hotline was linked directly to their NOC for the region and their turnaround response time was next to nil. Once we were relocating hardware across the server room and made a big hurry to relocate the router to a new rack, in the middle of that move (it took 5 minutes) we get a phone call from Sprint's NOC asking us if we knew our router was disconnected. Support was THAT good. To top it off this was all at 3AM!
A few things to note running a T1 in a rural community, be prepared to pay for backhaul. We got nailed 1500/mo for each T1 PRI that we had, the majority of that was the backhaul fee that verizon tacked on. The other is the interminable slowness in the response of their field support crew. Lastly, but not the least, is if the field techs know what they are doing when they are trying to diagnose a dead loop. Not to mention the quality of the copper that is in place.
A commercial grade T1 has a soft bandwidth cap, meaning that you can exceed the limit imposed by your provider, as long as it does not stay constant or they will be calling about it. The majority of the providers package an uptime policy that promises the end user 24/7/365 or they will get someone out there within a agreed upon time period and fix the sucker.
FINALLY, the creme de la creme, NO RESTRICTIONS, NO BLOCKED PORTS! You can do anything and everything with your blessed T1 without your provider blowing a gasket over.
I do not care what the others say about their lookalike cable or DSL accounts, ownership of a T1 is still the Holy Grail of the geek community.
1.5Mbps up, 1.5Mbps down, no arguments, no caps, no restrictions, no worries.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
After ten years, why is dial-up still the only option for many areas?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I have 15/15 in the US for $30/mo. It's a government-funded fiber network over which any provider can sell data, voice or video.
Enigma
This happened to me while I was in school around 99/00 as well. Mine was more along the lines of action response: We actually had our room stormed by the network police at my school. They are a medium sized private school, but got in early to the whole interweb thingy and they "own" their own Class B Range on the internet. The network is very fast and they have multiple T1 lines. Apparently I was using over half of the university bandwidth for about 12 hours straight.
My roommate slowed them down, while I ran back to our computer area and powered everything off. We claimed we didn't know what was going on. Before powering back on, I replaced the NICs in EVERY computer we had and needless to say, we slowed down our network usage a tad after that fateful Saturday.
I've had a T1 going into my home for years, paying around $300/month for it. The T1 itself is guarenteed bandwidth but you usually do not terminate it at the phone company. Instead the T1 gets terminated at an ISP (which can be the phone company but is usually not). Well, ok, in REALITY the T1 is usually bundled into a T3 or fiber and THEN terminated at an ISP, but the bandwidth is still guarenteed up until the ISP. You don't go into a packet switch until you hit the ISPs network and it doesn't really matter until you hit the ISP's backhaul to the internet. At that point there is usually so much bandwidth that you get the full T1 rate 'to the internet'.
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
With a T1 you get guranteed bandwidth, guranteed quality of service, and most importantly guranteed turnaround times when the service is interrupted for whatever reason. You do not get these gurantees with cable/DSL. This is why I always laugh when businesses run their entire office(s) off of cable/DSL connections and shit bricks when it drops and it takes 2-3 days to get it back online...you get the level of service that you pay for. Companies like to think they're saving money by going with a residential-grade broadband connection such as cable/DSL, then find out the hard way how much money they lose w/out a guranteed turnaround time, as is the case with a T1.
In Silicon Valley, MCI owns a lot of local copper and fiber, thanks to having acquired Metropolitan Fiber Systems and Brooks Fiber. As a result, I've worked in a number of buildings with local loops and thus full-service Internet access available directly from both AT&T/SBC/Pacific Bell and MCI/UUnet/Worldcomm.
I've also worked in buildings with local loops available from both SBC and Verizon in the Dallas metro area.
In each case, the incumbent baby Bell has quoted higher prices than their competitor.
The real reason T1 lines are so expensive is they are part of the regulated products from the ILEC. Last time when I ran an ISP in the mid/late 90's a T1 from Nynex/verizon was just under $500/month point to point if both points were servedby the same telco switch. If not there was an additional milage charge.
NYS has lots of local telco's from when phone service was new covering anywhere from one or two exchanges to multiple exchanges. In the next county over from where I am outside Verizon land you can get a point to point T1 for under $200/month.
The bove prices are just the telco line charge, any internet, etc access is extra.
DSL is an unregulated service so you can get a DSL line that uses more telco resources then a T1 for under $50/month.
No, they're the real deal. What I think happened is that DSL and cable put pricing pressure on T1 vendors, and the secondary costs all dropped as well. Higher-end services haven't dipped as sharply, I think (though I don't normally work with anything bigger than a bonded pair of T1 lines in my practice).
Frame is still a separate product, though I'm seeing less of it out there except in corporate internal networks for joining multiple facilities. I also have a couple of accounts where a T1 was brought in for voice delivery, and the leftover capacity after the phone lines were split out was given away for free to the data side (not truly free - they paid primo dollars for the voice service). It all varies.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I've written shipping software for a living. People do ship very expensive watches through UPS and FedEx, no problem. Like you hinted at in your posted yourself, the trick is just to pay for insurance.
"On the other hand, large chunks of the US are getting FTTH lit up right now."
I keep hearing this, but certainly not my chunk of the US. As far as I can tell only a few eas/west coast areas and some part of Texas is getting any of this.
I figure where I am (Columbus, Ohio) it will be 10 years before any of them even think about moving off 80 year old grandmothers in the switchboard.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.