When Only T1 Will Do

By: John Shepler

In the age of gigabit fiber connections, the venerable T1 line might be thought of as a relic of the past. Not at all. T1 service is alive and well. It might even be exactly what you need right now in the way of bandwidth and affordability.

Why Would Anyone Want a T1 Line?
T1 is the most mature, most deployed and most available of the telecom line services. You might think that Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) would be the leader in that category. It was. POTS is giving way in many organizations to newer premises VoIP and telephony in the cloud. That still leaves what used to be the POTS lines connected. What are they good for? Think: T1

T1 lines are amazingly versatile. They make perfect telephone trunks for channelized T1 phone, ISDN PRI and even high quality VoIP. They are almost certainly available at your location, wherever you may happen to be. Plus, T1 is readily affordable by just about any size business.

The T1 Telephone Line
Did you know that T1 actually started out as a telephone trunking technology? If the telco companies didn’t have a burning desire to consolidate the mass of wiring that interconnected their switching centers, T1 might never have come about. In the beginning, it was one telephone conversation per pair of wires. Then the phone companies found a way to send multiple conversations down the same pair simultaneously using a method called carrier telephony. It works like the radio band. Each conversation had its own assigned carrier frequency separated from the others so they wouldn’t interfere. This is the analog way to get the job done.

The breakthrough that was T1 involved the conceptual change from analog to digital. By digitizing the phone conversations, you could send 24 of them down the same pair of wires and they wouldn’t interfere. What’s more, digital technology got rid of all that noise and crosstalk that analog long distance lines were famous for in the first part of the last century.

A channelized T1 telephone line consists of 24 time division multiplexed segments or channels that are synchronized at the transmitting and receiving end. Each analog phone signal is digitized into 8 bits by 64 Kbps, which preserves the call quality. What grade of wiring do you need to transmit these calls? Ordinary twisted pair telephone cable will do just fine. With signal regenerators every mile or so, a T1 line can be stretched as far as you like.

ISDN PRI Telephone Trunks
T1 telephone lines are used by in-house PBX business phone systems. In recent decades, that technology has been upgraded to something called ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface. It’s the same T1 line, but with a slightly different format. ISDN PRI provides 23 separate phone lines plus a control and signaling channel that runs the system. This is the preferred option for call centers because of its fast connection times and high voice quality. Multiple T1 lines can be installed to most PBX systems to match the number of outside lines needed.

T1 for VoIP
VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is a different method of achieving the same phone service. VoIP was designed to be compatible with computer networks rather than a unique telephone standard. Even so, VoIP trunks, called SIP trunks are needed to get the phone calls to the telephone service provider in the cloud. Unchannelized T1 lines work great for this because they are highly reliable and offer enough bandwidth to carry two dozen or more simultaneous telephone conversations.

T1 Internet Lines
T1 for Internet access, with its paltry 1.5 Mbps bandwidth might be considered laughable in this age of gigabit broadband. It’s not so funny when your business is on a farm or so far out in the wilderness that you are lucky to have a landline phone. Those landline phone wires can also carry T1. That means if you can get phone service, you can get at least T1 broadband where there is no fiber or even cell towers for miles.

Is 1.5 Mbps truly a problem? It likely is if you want to transfer HD video production. Not really, though, if you have a small business and need the line for credit card verification, a connection back to a franchise office, or just email and casual web browsing. You can increase this bandwidth by combining, called bonding, multiple T1 lines together. This will give you anywhere from 3 to 12 Mbps, depending on the number of lines you bond.

How About The Cost?
People who think T1 is expensive remember back a decade or two, when a single T1 line would set you back at least a grand a month. Today, that figure is more like $200 to $300 in most cases. It still depends on how much competing service is in your area and how far you are from the telco office. Is this expensive? Business grade cable broadband is also priced in that range, but with “up to” higher advertised bandwidth… if you happen to be next to where the cable line runs. Even then, cable is shared bandwidth while T1 is dedicated to your particular company.

If your need is for highly reliable PBX telephone lines, point to point private lines, dedicated Internet access or rural broadband applications, T1 might still be the optimum service for your company. Check out T1 and bonded T1 pricing and availability and compare with your alternative service options.



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One SIP Trunk Beats Two T1 Lines

In traditional thinking, you have your business telephone service and you have your business broadband service. One tends to have nothing to do with the other. In fact, you probably buy them from different providers. There’s a good reason to reconsider that approach now. You can get the same or better results for less money. How? With a service called SIP Trunking.

SIP Trunking has nothing to do with luggage or elephants. It’s all about delivering modern telecom services. Trunking is a technical term that means using a single line or other communications path to transport many different transmissions simultaneously. The telephone industry had a pressing need for trunks to handle the explosive growth of telegraph and, later, telephone lines. Both wired and wireless analog carrier systems were developed to consolidate many telephone lines into a few trunks. This was especially critical for connecting telephone switching systems in different towns or states.

The trunk lines that we are most familiar with today are T1 telephone lines or ISDN PRI. These are two slightly different standards for a digital telephone line that carries as many as two dozen simultaneous phone calls. T1 or ISDN PRI trunks are very popular for corporate PBX phone systems or call centers. Both need large numbers of outside phone lines to communicate.

In actuality, ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface uses a T1 line to deliver 23 phone lines in individual digital channels plus one specialized channel used for switching, signaling and data such as Caller ID. The T1 voice or T1 telephone lines uses all 24 available channels for phone calls, but doesn’t offer Caller ID and has slower call setup times.

T1 lines are pretty versatile. A lot of companies have two T1 lines coming into the building. One carries IDSN PRI with anywhere between 10 and 23 outside phone lines. The other T1 line provides dedicated broadband Internet access for the computer network. The bandwidth is 1.5 Mbps for both upload and download. Even though there are two T1 lines installed, one has nothing to do with the other. They are electrically separate and may have been ordered from two different service providers.

The cost of two separate T1 lines is more than many smaller businesses can justify. They don’t need anywhere close to 23 outside lines, often less than half that, and 1.5 Mbps Internet access is plenty for credit card verification, online ordering, file transfers, email, and casual Web access. They could probably get by with half an ISDN PRI and half a T1 Internet line if they could buy half a service for each.

SIP Trunking gives you that half-a-service option by combining voice and data onto a single converged trunk line. That could be a T1 line or an Ethernet over Copper connection that uses the same twisted pair telco wiring but offers high bandwidth options. Actually, a single SIP trunk is better than two half-T1 lines. It also costs less than those two T1s you may have now.

The SIP in SIP Trunking stands for Session Initiation Protocol. That’s the switching technology used in VoIP telephone systems. A SIP phone is a VoIP telephone that can plug right into your network. Older analog phones can be turned into SIP phones by using Analog Telephone Adaptors (ATA).

Now, here’s what SIP Trunking does to consolidate lines. A SIP Trunk carries both voice and data simultaneously. It can do that because both are in the same packet network protocol. The broadband Internet data is already packetized. By using adaptors or SIP phones, the telephones are made to look like other network devices. Once everything is communicating in packets, a single line can transport both.

One question you probably have immediately is about how the SIP trunk prevents telephone conversations from being garbled when computers are sending data. Companies that have tried to use broadband phone services to share their Internet service find that performance is iffy. Sometimes the conversations sound good. Other times, not so good. That’s because the Internet doesn’t treat sensitive voice conversations any differently than file transfers or video downloads. One packet is just like the next on the internet.

A SIP trunk uses Internet technology, but it doesn’t use the Internet itself. The SIP trunk is a private line between your company and your service provider. Once your packets get to the service provider they are switched onto the Internet or onto the public phone system, depending on where they are supposed to go. The SIP trunk is engineered to ensure that telephone calls do not contend with data packets for use of the trunk line.

Here’s how that works. The interface equipment, managed routers, at each end of the SIP trunk are set up to establish Class of Service (CoS) for each of the many simultaneous signals that travel over the trunk. Telephone calls have priority in this system. Whenever a call is in progress, it takes the bandwidth needed to ensure high voice quality. Only the bandwidth not used for telephone calls is available to transport broadband Internet service. When a call hangs up, data packets can now use the additional bandwidth no longer commandeered by the phone call.

Obviously, you can’t have dozens of phone calls on a T1 line being used as a SIP trunk or your Internet access will slow to a crawl. Most small companies don’t have that problem. They may need only 6 to 12 outside lines at the most. Even those lines aren’t engaged 100%. The result is that there is plenty of bandwidth for both telephone calls and broadband access at the same time.

Efficiency is what makes SIP trunks a better value than separate T1 lines for voice and data. By actively managing the available bandwidth, a SIP trunk makes unused bandwidth available for Internet service while ensuring that every telephone call has the resources it needs for a high quality conversation.

Are you in the market for both telephone and business broadband service or concerned that you are paying more than you should for these two services? If so, get SIP trunking pricing and options to see if this service is right for your business.

How HD Audio Will Transform VoIP

Those of us old enough to remember when phones were analog and switches were mechanical have a soft spot for the clarity of the old school system. There was a distinctness and intimacy to those old time conversations that has long been lost. Well, perhaps lost only for some decades. There’s a new move afoot to give VoIP phone conversations a starting fidelity that will make today’s handsets and cellphones seem like toy walkie talkies by comparison.

The technology is HD or high definition audio. It’s called HD Voice by Polycom, the telephone manufacturer producing IP telephones with this capability built-in. The idea is to reverse the steady decline in voice intelligibility that we’ve experienced with the digital transformation and create a new standard that is superior to anything that has come before.

There’s a parallel here. Something similar happened in the radio industry. If you’ve ever owned one of those big console radios from the 1930’s or even the table models from the 50’s, you know that AM radio can sound amazingly lifelike. The advent of transistor radios shrunk the size of the loudspeakers, and thus the range of sound frequencies that can be heard. “Tinny” was the word to describe the loss of low end or bass notes. Car radios added their own restrictions by rolling off the high frequencies to reduce noise and static. It took a new technology, FM radio, to expand the frequency range and eliminate the background noise before the term high fidelity could be applied.

Old-timey phones had very few parts. The carbon microphone and electromagnetic earphone were powered by a battery at the phone company and connected to a similar phone at the other end. There were no electronics in the circuit. The telephone company switch was really a mechanical switch that simply connected phones together. The resulting sound had a richness that made local conversations much closer to someone sitting next to you than you hear today.

I remember when I first noticed the difference. It was when the company I worked for upgraded their old phone system with a new digital PBX and desksets. The first calls seemed slightly more muffled, less sparkling clear on the new phones. The effect was subtle, but noticeable. There was no noise or distortion apparent, but something was missing.

What was missing, I later figured out, was some of the audio range in the conversation. It wasn’t digital that degraded phone audio specifically. It started with long distance calling. The analog carrier multiplexing used to load multiple conversations onto copper wire and microwave trunk lines needed filters to keep one conversation from interfering with another. After much research, a frequency range of 300 to 3400 Hz was selected as standard. Frequencies above 3400 Hz add to naturalness, but don’t limit understandability of speech very much. Get rid of them and you can transmit more telephone channels on a trunk. You also get rid of annoying hiss, which is a high frequency phenomena. Frequencies below 300 Hz also aren’t necessary for intelligibility, but certainly give voices and other sounds their distinctiveness. By getting rid of the low frequencies, problems with power line hum getting into phone lines are greatly reduced or eliminated.

This standard was maintained when the industry changed from analog to digital. It kept everything compatible and consistent. Digital technology was a boon to long distance calls, especially overseas. It totally eliminated the noise and crosstalk that were common in the analog era. That advantage went away with cell phones, which can be noisy or even drop out.

Early implementations of VoIP only made matters worse. Packet transmission added distortion from lost packets and variable transmission time or jitter. Latency, a time delay through the network, was almost unknown with analog and TDM telephony. Now it’s not uncommon on poorly implemented systems to have a clipping effect so that you can’t both talk at the same time.

What HD audio intends to do is to lift telephone voice quality to a new standard above and beyond what we’ve ever had. This is accomplished by using a wideband CODEC (Coder/Decoder) to handle the conversion from analog microphone and earpiece to digital transmission. Bandwidth is doubled to 7 kHz with the new standard G.722 Codec and can be extended up to 20 Khz, the same quality as CDs and digital FM radio.

HD Voice is here now. You can get it with Polycom business phones and a service provider like RealLinx that can provide the hosted PBX and carefully managed bandwidth to maintain high quality phone audio. Of course, this only works within an organization that is set up for HD Voice or among users that all have the G.722 Codec available. When one party is using traditional telephone technology, everything defaults to the universal G.711 telco standard and its limited frequency range.

Even so, higher fidelity within your organization can improve conversation intelligibility, including nuances in the voice that are often lost when talking on the phone rather than in person. This can be valuable when budgets and time restrictions reduce face to face meetings in favor of audio and video teleconferencing.

Are you ready to replace an aging phone system or order equipment for a new enterprise or new location? If so, why limit yourself to yesterday’s technology when you can have something that will provide a competitive edge at lower overall cost than you have now? Don’t make a move until you get pricing and features on HD Voice Hosted PBX VoIP telephone systems.

Triple Play For Business

One of the hottest trends in consumer telecom services is called the “residential triple play.” This is a bundling that combines three electronic services that nearly every home subscribes to. They are television, telephone and broadband.

The bundling is made possible because one provider can deliver all three at a combined price that is lower than buying the same services from three separate providers. Cable companies are in the best position to deliver the triple play, but the package is also offered by telephone companies and wireless service providers. The advantage for cable is due to the very high bandwidth capability of their HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) facilities.

That’s great for consumers, but what about business? Is there such a thing as triple play for business? You bet. It’s available for businesses with their own business locations.

Not surprisingly, a huge provider of triple play is Comcast. You may know that Comcast is the largest Cable TV provider in the US. Comcast broadband is hugely popular with both consumers and small businesses. But did you also know that Comcast is the 3rd largest phone company in America?

The idea that the coaxial cable from a Cable company is pretty much the same as the one that connects the TV antenna on the roof is way out of date. Today’s cable is a sophisticated collection of multiplexed channels that carry voice, video and data equally well.

Multiplexing is the technique that divides the 1,000 MHz bandwidth capacity of the coaxial combined fiber and copper transmission facility into neatly spaced 6 MHz channels. Those channels are exactly the same size as over the air TV channels so it’s easy to fit one TV station per channel. However, those channels can be used for other purposes as well.

The two most popular non-TV services on Cable are broadband and telephone. You have your choice of one or more standard business phone lines or an ISDN PRI trunk line that is bundles up to 23 lines for connection to an in-house PBX telephone system.

You probably are using DSL, satellite or T1 lines now for your business broadband service. It’s likely that you’re getting something like 1 to 2 Mbps download bandwidth. DSL can go higher, but your bandwidth decreases the further you get from the telephone company central office. Cable has such high bandwidth capacity, that it delivers business broadband at 50 to 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. Comcast’s smallest service starts at 12 Mbps/2Mbps.

You’re probably wondering if you can afford a triple play package? It’s likely you can’t afford not to go this way if you have the type of business where your customers wait on-site, like a doctor’s office or auto service center. That's where the TV service of triple play has its value. There are also packages for businesses like bars and restaurants that serve a walk-in clientele. How much are we talking? About the price of that T1 line will get you faster broadband plus telephone service with basic TV channels included.

What if you don’t need television in your business? Is there such a thing as double play?

Of course. Many, many professional offices, retail stores and quick service restaurants need a combination of reliable phone service and high speed broadband to meet their needs. Get these two services cheaper than buying separately from a telephone company and an Internet service provider.

Can you cut costs while getting the same or better voice, data and video services for your company? It’s well worth your time to find out. Check availability and pricing for bundled business broadband, telephone and TV services now.

Integrated Access Using Ethernet over Copper

T1 lines are generally set up as either broadband data pipes or digital telephone trunks. Having to buy separate T1 lines for voice and data proved to be too pricey for many smaller businesses that wanted the robustness of T1 line services but didn’t really need all the capability of a two line arrangement. The solution was Integrated T1. It’s a combination of voice and data on a single T1 line. Integrated T1 has been a problem solver for small businesses over the years, but now there’s an even more cost effective service available. It’s Integrated access using Ethernet over Copper.

Ethernet over Copper, or EoC, is coming on strong as a competitor for the same needs as T1 lines. Both services are provisioned on common twisted pair copper telco wiring that is likely already in place for most businesses. Both are highly reliable telecom services with dedicated, not shared, bandwidth. So, why would you pick one solution over another?

In many markets you’ll find that T1 and EoC now cost roughly the same. But look closer and you’ll see that for the same price T1 is giving you 1.5 Mbps and Ethernet over Copper is delivering 2 Mbps and sometimes 3 Mbps. You can trade up for more bandwidth on both T1 and EoC by bonding-in additional copper pair. But the cost of those extra T1 lines goes up a lot faster than Ethernet bandwidth increases.

Now, let’s look at how Integrated voice and data is achieved. Dynamic integrated T1 lines are the latest incarnation of the T1 Integrated service. Bandwidth is assigned by default to broadband access. Anytime a phone line is requested, the bandwidth needed for that phone call takes priority and is protected for the duration of the call. This is the dynamic nature of the service. The bandwidth you have available for broadband is a function of what’s left over after all the telephone calls in progress are taken care of. When someone hangs up, that bandwidth is immediately put back in the broadband bandwidth pool.

In practice, Integrated T1 is a good service if you need 12 or fewer outside phone lines. More than this and your broadband Internet service will be creeping along at less than 750 Kbps. But integrated Access using Ethernet over Copper offers more phone lines and higher broadband speeds. A common EoC service running at 10 Mbps has lots of bandwidth for both. You may be able to get as many as 46 phone lines on EoC, which is equivalent to two full ISDN PRI trunks. In fact, this service delivers its phone lines with a PRI handoff to your PBX telephone system. You may also be able to choose an analog handoff for smaller phone systems or SIP handoff to your newer IP PBX in-house telephone system.

How much of your 10 Mbps will 46 phone lines eat up? That depends on what CODEC you are using, but let’s say it is G.711, the international standard. Figuring on 80 Kbps per call with overhead, a figure used by many SIP bandwidth calculators (Cisco uses 87.2 Kbps), that adds up to around 4 Mbps. That leaves you over 6 Mbps for broadband access, similar to what many companies are using now.

No need to stop there, though. Ethernet over Copper is often available in the same locations at bandwidths of 15 Mbps and 20 Mbps. This is far higher than is practical or even affordable with T1 lines. Are you running a larger company network or a call center that needs much higher capacity? It’s likely time to consider Ethernet over Fiber, or EoF. At this point you are probably running a converged voice and data network and can benefit from SIP trunking based on SIP switching for enterprise VoIP telephone systems.

What voice and data bandwidth solutions are best for your operation? There is a wide range of service suitable for the smallest mom and pop grocery stores right on up to Fortune 500 corporations. Why not let an expert telecom service broker get a complete list of services and pricing to meet your particular needs? Request a voice and data bandwidth quote now to see what’s available for your business locations.

So, What Does ISDN Stand For?

If you are involved with business telephone systems, you’ve no doubt heard the term ISDN bandied about. But what is ISDN and what can it do for your company?

As you might suspect, ISDN is an acronym. It stands for Integrated Serviced Digital Network.

I guess that’s not much help in and of itself. ISDN is a digital telephone standard that was originally intended to replace analog telephone lines for both residential and business users. It never really took off on the consumer side because DSL, Cable broadband and VoIP came along with higher bandwidths and lower prices. But ISDN did become a popular trunking service for PBX telephone systems. It also has a specialty niche application.

There are two ISDN standards you should know about. The low bandwidth version is called BRI or Basic Rate Interface. The higher bandwidth version is called PRI or Primary Rate Interface. They are constructed from the same elements. PRI just has more of them than BRI.

The two basic building blocks of ISDN are the B or bearer channel and D or delta channel. B channels have a bandwidth of 64 Kbps each. That’s exactly enough for one digitized telephone call or a low bandwidth digital modem. Remember 56 Kbps dial-up modems? ISDN BRI was supposed to replace them with one B channel for telephone service and a second B channel for modem service. The D channel is 16 Kbps and is used for signaling and control of the two bearer channels.

This arrangement of two bearer channels plus a delta channel is called 2B+D in telephony lingo. You have the option to use both bearer channels for telephone service so that you’ll have two digital phone lines. Or both bearer channels can be assigned to modem data with a bandwidth of 128 Kbps. That was considered fast when ISDN BRI was introduced, but quickly became obsolete with the introduction of broadband Internet service.

While ISDN BRI flopped as a digital home telephone service, it has found a new lease on life with radio stations and audio production. Standard analog telephone lines don’t have the bandwidth to reproduce natural sounding voices. But ISDN lines with the right CODECs (Coders/Decoders) can transport studio quality microphone signals from sports venues and other remote locations. They are also used extensively by voiceover artists and for high fidelity call-in interviews on-air.

ISDN PRI has the same B and D channels that make up BRI service. Only PRI is configured as 23B+D. That’s 23 bearer channels and one delta channel. The delta channel is still used for signaling and call control. Each B channel can support one telephone conversation. So, if you order ISDN PRI service for your PBX telephone system you can have up to 23 outside lines. They can be individually configured as incoming, outgoing, local, long distance, toll free or some combination of these.

Most PBX phone systems come with at least one ISDN PRI interface standard. Some have multiple ISDN ports so that you can add more phone lines if you exceed the capacity of 23 lines on one ISDN PRI trunk. Larger companies and call centers can make good use of the extra ports. The D channel handles call switching much faster than a standard analog phone line and also provides Caller ID for all B channels.

Is ISDN the service that is right for your telephony needs? If you have more than a half-dozen outside lines, you might be able to save money by converting to ISDN PRI. Even if you already have PRI service, prices have plunged in recent years and you may be able to cut your monthly phone expenses significantly with a competitive service provider. Find out right now by checking ISDN PRI prices and availability for your business location.