T1's go down a lot - I have seen data from ATT that says 400 seconds a month down. Not an issue for you and your lan - but for your cell tower that is a lot of dropped calls.
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?
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T1's go down a lot - I have seen data from ATT that says 400 seconds a month down. Not an issue for you and your lan - but for your cell tower that is a lot of dropped calls.
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?