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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)
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.
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.
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
I know that Pacific Bell T1s always came with business grade support - as in, they are provided to you by a business whose motto is "We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company."
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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+).
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
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 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
It would be nice if you had a clue what you were talking about.
But sadly, you don't.
Both a DSL line and a T1 are going to terminate at the same CO. No, a T1 isn't using anything other than a conditioned pair in the same cable that your DSL line is going through. The conditioning required might involve either cleaning some contacts along the way or just finding a clean pair. A long, long time ago this involved checking out amplifiers along the way and such, but that is pretty much gone in metro/suburban areas. You might find an amplifier in a far-flung rural area and that might need conditioning.
But a T1 in the middle of nowhere isn't going to be cheap, either. But it might be the best you can get if you don't have cable TV and are miles and miles past 17,000 feet from the CO.
Completely clueless post. You DO NOT oversubscribe T1. T1 is dedicated pipe. End of the story. You can oversubscribe Frame Relay, though. I worked for BBN Planet at some point, and was involved with oversubscription issues (Frame Relay). That was BS #1. Now BS #2 is "DSL requires one phone line, T1 requires many phone lines". That's 64 DS0 you have in mind, right? So, the reason it is BS is that "DSL requires one phone line" from the customer premises to the nearest DSLAM only. From that point, that has to be a fat pipe (but guess, what? DSLAM is another point you can do oversubscription.
I work at a canadian telco and if I ever want to placate customers about prices I just quote them US high speed prices. They are ussually four times as expensive for the same service. ADSL 3.0 MB is 39.95 CND here with great up time and very low saturation. I get 300KB downloads almost all the time.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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."
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?
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?
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.
The parent is correct. You seem to be the one a little out of it. And snidey at that.
T1s are point-to-point circuit switched connections. The Internet only factors in if one device on that point-to-point connection happens to be a gateway router.
Being point to point, it's isolated, secured, easier to secure, and probably guaranteed via some policy or contract. You don't share with no one.
DSL has a same setup; you don't share your connection like cable internet. However, with DSL, you only have a closed circuit between you and an isp. To reach your office across the state, the connection has to traverse your ISP's routers and distribution systems then to your office's. Do a traceroute one day.
With a T1, the closed circuit is between you and your office cross-state. Your ISP only uses layer 2 switching to make sure the circuit takes the optimal path. Once it's connected, it's locked in. And unlike internet via DSL or cable with your ISP in the mix, TCP/IP doesn't have to factor in at all if you don't want it to. You get your choice of protocols for addressing and transport.
You seem to think because since you saw some guy hooking up what looked like a phone jack to your buddy's computer that you're en expert in the field and have the right to be a pretentious dick about it. Sorry to disappoint you.
In this case, the medium is not quite as important. The cabling is nothing much more then a polished POTS line. However, you still have the other 6 layers of the OSI model to think about.
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.
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.
I don't know if this is worth mentioning, but I'm about to upgrade to a 10 mbps from the 1.544 T1. I think its a new not available everywhere low end OC3 DIA line over copper. Thats about 6.5 times the bandwidth, and about twice the price of T1.
Its taken a while to install (last message from xo was that it was running at 100 mbps, I didn't see the problem) but they also said I was the first in my area to get it.
Worth a look, xo.com
In a word. _NO_
T1 circuits are a headache for the phone company and businesses pay for it. We have had as many as 3 plus a provided hot spare at one time and they even temporarily added two more during a cutover (from Sprint to Sprint, but that is really a Sprint oddity that technically was not required). They send a person down every manhole and up every pole where there is a junction of any kind and put little red "flags" on the connector blocks for the T1 pairs. If our line went down it was back up fast. Most every T1 is sold by the local telco as the local loop charge under tarrif, with the network (Internet) connection as a "port charge". Then there are various taxes and fees. Always look at the total cost for each month, the MRC, monthly reoccuring charge. We had several incidents over since 1995 (actually surprisingly few considering the 12.5 years in total). They were almost always fixed in minutes, and 3 went beyond that, one was about 2 hours, another at 5 hours was caused by a cable cut (moving a neighborhood to fiber and they missed the red flagged connections), and the worst when Verizon swapped 2 fiber cables during a routine maintenance and that almost killed us with 20 hours of outage on thiose circuits dependant on the fibers in question. It also took out some Navy resources so I don't think they slouched on the repair time.
Like other posters are saying, you buy the guarantee of full T1 bandwidth (symmetric of course), as well as the uptime guarantee. Sprint escalates periodically the trouble ticket that is created until a Sprint VP is brought in on the issue. They currently have a horrid sales team but great backend support people.
And as to making sense to charge more to a business? Not really. Businesses are competitive and we always shop around for connectivity and bandwidth. Given equal solutions and technical staff ability, etc. we buy the lower cost solution. Consumers just don't spend the same amount of resources to locate the good deals normally, and a consumer buying a T1 is not usually looked at as a prospect for more sales. Businesses are helped to use up all the bandwidth they are sold (hopefully effectively) under the premise they will be able to buy more circuits and bandwidth. Although a T1 is also not an "average Joe" product. So there is little need to push a consumer oriented marketing drive. (And T1 tech does continue to advance, our last T1 was delivered over HSDSL, still looks like a T1 acts like a T1 etc. Just uses a slightly differnt line card, the TSU stayed the same...)
Last quip in general, a DSL line is a digital subscriber line, and covers T1, T3, ISDN, ADSL (which is commonly shortened to just DSL), SDSL, and HSDSL. At least as far as US telcos are concerned...
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
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.
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?
"with registered mail the recipient must show ID and sign"
There's another difference with registered mail. Say you want to ship somebody a $10,000 watch. Do you fedex it? No. It goes registered mail. Why? Fedex is just some company and if they lose it (it happens) or it gets stolen (this happens more often) your recourses are insurance or civil prosecution. But, if you send it registered mail and it gets stolen its literally a federal offence; heads roll and the FBI investigates. I used to buy and sell watches and in this industry things tend not to get lost with registered mail. But with private couriers? Uh, well, people use registered mail...
Need Mercedes parts ?
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