Yes, You can Still Get a T1 Line

By: John Shepler

When the Internet was just beginning to take off and business was starting to migrate to the Web, the connectivity of choice was the T1 line. T1 is no longer king, as business cable broadband and fiber have eclipsed it with much higher bandwidth capability and much lower prices per Mbps. Even so, there are places and applications where T1 is exactly the right fit. The only question is: “Can you still find a T1 line?”.

Why Would You Want To?
T1 is a technical standard introduced by the Bell system in 1962. That’s right, the telephone company. This gives you a hint for where T1 is well entrenched. It is phone systems for small and medium sized businesses. The original implementation of T1 phone lines replaced 24 twisted pair copper analog phone lines with two pair running a digital protocol. A later scheme called ISDN PRI uses the same T1 line to carry 23 phone line conversations plus switching data and caller ID.

When the long distance carriers went to T1 and its higher bandwidth T3 cousin to replace the old analog carrier systems, one thing you immediately noticed was the disappearance of noise and crosstalk. In addition to using fewer circuits, digital technology gave us higher quality conversations.

Where do you find T1 lines for phones? Any business with multiple outside lines is a candidate. The more lines, the easier it is to justify the cost of a T1 or ISDN digital line. Typically six to twelve lines make more sense on digital than analog connections. Many key telephone and PBX (Private Branch Exchange) in-house phone systems support T1 directly or can easily be interfaced.

Rock Solid Performance and Reliability
T1 lines are dedicated point to point connections. It’s a pair of wires or a couple pair that go from your location to a telco equipment office. You may get your service directly from the incumbent local telephone company or from a competitive provider that leases the lines and terminal equipment from the telco.

T1 and ISDN PRI divide the line bandwidth into channels. That’s 24 channels for T1 and 23 for ISDN. The leftover bandwidth is used by ISDN for switching, ringing and Caller ID. Whatever channels are not in use at the moment simply idle and wait to carry a phone call. Unlike typical broadband services, there is no sharing of T1 bandwidth with other businesses or consumers. The bandwidth is dedicated to your usage. It’s also symmetrical by nature. In other words the bandwidth is the same in both directions.

Another important characteristic of T1 lines is that they are synchronized at both ends using PCM or pulse code modulation to convert between analog and digital. This compares with packets used in IP networks, which do not have the timing synchronization as they do not use channels. Why does this matter? T1 lines have minimal latency. It’s just the delay through the equipment and the distance between locations. You don’t get the variable latency of Internet routing or jumbled up packets that cause dropouts and distortion in VoIP calls. This clarity and reliability of performance makes for clean reliable phone calls and also makes T1 lines great for credit card verification.

T1 Broadband…It’s a Thing
The idea of a 1.5 Mbps line called broadband is pretty much laughable these days… unless you can’t get even that. That’s right. Rural broadband is the vast wasteland of our time. There are so many locations in the boonies that get nothing. No cell phone service and certainly no cable or fiber. What they can get is T1 lines. Why? Because they are already wired for Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). T1 was designed to run on ordinary phone cables with regeneration equipment every mile so so.

So, if you have a rural business, you can probably hook up with a T1 line or two. Have one for your phones. Another as a “last mile” connection to the Internet. You won’t be downloading 4K movies in any reasonable amount of time, but you probably aren’t doing that anyway. T1 can support your inventory management and other business software. If you need more bandwidth you can bond another T1 for 3 Mbps and more to get up to 10 or 12 Mbps. That much bandwidth won’t come cheap and isn’t available everywhere, but… if you gotta have it.

A Faster Alternative
Technology advancements have resulted in newer protocols than the sixty-something year old T1 standard. One called Ethernet over Copper uses the same multiple twisted pair cable as T1 but runs much faster. The tradeoff is distance from the equipment office. If you are within a mile or two, you may get 10 or 20 Mbps. Way out yonder, EoC probably won’t work, but T1 will. Ethernet over Copper is worth look at if you are just outside the city limits but not served by fiber or cable. Pricing is pretty attractive and you might get all the bandwidth you need.

Are other connections too unstable for your phone system or are you having trouble getting any connectivity? There are numerous carriers still supporting T1 and related technologies. Get a quote on a venerable T1 line and see if it meets your needs.

Lock In Telecom Cost Savings For Next Year

As we approach the end of the year and run the numbers to see how well we’ve done, it’s not unusual to get that nagging feeling that maybe we’re cutting into profits by spending a lot more than necessary to conduct business. Nowhere is that more likely than in your networking and telecom expenses. It is almost always certain that a thorough competitive search will provide opportunities to pay less for the same level of service you have right now. Do this before the end of the year and you’ll lock in those savings for all of next year.

Why is this possible? There are two major elements to the cost savings. First is competition. Time was that you could have any provider you wanted as long as it was the local telephone company. The last few decades have seen that landscape change as deregulation opened the door to other competitors. First to go was the telcos lock on long distance service. Then local service became competitive. Finally, new vendors built out regional and nationwide networks of their own to provide metro and wide area networking connections. Today, you can get competitive bids on even international circuits.

The second major driver of cost savings is new technology. Nearly all telecom networking standards were designed by the telephone companies for their own use. It was decades later that these services were released for use by general business. As communications has moved from telephone calls to computer networks, these solutions still work but require a protocol conversion from LAN to WAN to LAN. It’s no longer the most efficient way to transport data and rarely the least expensive.

What’s better? IP centric networks closely match the packet based networks that are almost universally used for company LANs. Ethernet, the most popular networking protocol, has been extended from the LAN to the WAN. An Ethernet WAN connection can directly connect your LANs at two locations and bridge them into one large network.

Consider lower speed telecom connections. T1 has been the standard for decades. It is now being challenged by Ethernet over Copper (EoC) in many areas. Both T1 and EoC use the same twisted pair telco wiring that runs from your building to the nearest central office. They use different modulation schemes to achieve data transport and have different characteristics. T1 is limited to 1.5 Mbps per T1 line, although multiple lines can be bonded to create higher bandwidths up to 10 or 12 Mbps. There is no distance limit for this service and it works even for rural businesses. Ethernet over Copper can achieve much higher bandwidths of 10, 20, 50 or even 100 Mbps. However, the farther you are from the central office, the slower the line speed.

Equally or even more important, EoC is much less expensive than T1. You can get 3 Mbps EoC service for about the price of a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. Upgrade to 10 Mbps EoC for just 2 or 3 times the cost. Need lots of bandwidth? Move up to Ethernet over Fiber (EoF). The most popular connections are 10 to 100 Mbps, although many companies now order Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbps) and even 10 GigE.

Is this affordable? The combination of competition from hungry new carriers and technology advancements have caused prices to plunge from where they were a few years ago. Don’t be surprised if you can save 50% on your telephone and WAN connection or dedicated Internet service bills. If you are paying month to month on a old expired T1, PRI, DS3 or SONET contract, the savings may be even more dramatic.

How do you cash in? Simple. Get competitive quotes on voice, data and cloud services and compare with what you are spending now. You can do this any time, but if you lock in the savings by the end of the year, you’ll get the full benefit for all of the new year. Can you think of a better New Year’s resolution than to pocket all of that savings?

POTS Phone Service For Multiple Locations

Companies with many branch offices or other business locations spread out over the US, Canada and Puerto Rico can find themselves drowning in paperwork. Is it all the forms they need to file with the government? No, it’s just the phone bill... or should I say bills - lots and lots and lots of phone bills.

How does this happen? It happens a little at a time. First the business is established in a single location. They order business telephone services and dedicated Internet and the bill or 2 bills arrive each month. The manager or someone delegated pours over the bill each month looking for charges that don’t belong there, services that are no longer used, or employee abuse of phone privileges.

Soon the need arises for a branch office in the next state. That office orders its own phone service and gets its own bills. Each month, management at that site spends an hour or so perusing the bill before submitting it for payment.

Now, multiply this activity by 10, 20, 100, or 1,000 locations. Similar paper bills come in on completely separate accounts from completely separate phone service providers. The same reviews are simultaneously conducted. All the bills are separately submitted for payment. Can’t this all be coordinated somehow to achieve greater efficiency? Not hardly. Every locations has its own arrangement with its own incumbent or competitive service provider. Since each account is unique, there’s no commonality to take advantage of.

Now, replace that horror scenario with a single vendor that serves all locations and consolidates all those bills into one bill. This vendor has tools available for Telecom Expense Management (TEM) to make auditing telecom bills, tracking disputes and managing contracts a far easier task. Think of the hours saved when your bills are consolidated.

Who is this vendor? It is Ernest Communications, the nation’s largest telecom company that specializes in large multi-location POTS accounts through the United States. Ernest began in earnest, if you will, as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that opened the door to competitive local phone companies using the resources of the Public Switched Telephone Network. Since then, they’ve installed the facilities needed to give you reliable and affordable analog business phone service anywhere you locate.

Why analog? Isn’t the world going digital? True, large organizations are migrating to enterprise VoIP to converge their multi-location voice and data networks. This is a sophisticated process that offers cost and productivity improvements IF you can afford the capital expense involved and IF you have the resources to engineer, install and maintain the facilities.

Most smaller companies have only a handful of phones, maybe a dozen or two at each location. Some have only a single phone or a few multi-line desk sets that they picked up at the local office supply store. Their data network is a broadband connection to the Internet, if they even have one. What does the IT staff do all day? What IT staff?

These businesses are quite happy with traditional analog telephony, also called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. It’s reliable, voice quality is excellent and pricing is reasonable for a few phone lines. This is where Ernest Communications excels. They can do something other companies can’t. They can get you analog phone service for all locations you have and then consolidate the bills and offer extra benefits like blocking of 3rd party charges, elimination of hidden fees and highly competitive long distance rates.

If one or more locations is large enough to have an on-site PBX system, Ernest can supply a dedicated local PRI service to bundle up to 23 outside lines on one standard digital trunk line that plugs right into a jack on your PBX box. Are you using both telephone and Internet? Ernest offers Integrated T1 circuits that combine 6 telephone lines plus dynamically allocated broadband data on a single T1 line. They supply the Integrated Access Device that makes this system work.

Could you benefit from having a single competitive service provider who can get you excellent rates for each of your business locations, with service customized to meet your requirements and a consolidated bill to make telecom management easier? If you have multiple locations dealing with multiple phone companies, you should get competitive quotes for analog POTS telephone, Integrated T1 and ISDN PRI service that covers all of your needs with easy inclusion of future business expansion.

Using T1 Between Offices

T1 lines have many uses, including making connections between offices in the same city or across the country. Let’s take a look at how you would do this and what options are available.

The basic interoffice connection is the point to point T1 line. The term point to point means just what you think it does. This is a circuit that runs between two locations only. Actually, the connection is made from one business location to the nearest telco central office, then from central office to central office, and finally from the far end central office to the other location.

Why not just run wires directly between locations and avoid the routing through the central offices? You could do that, but unless the buildings are within sight of each other and you own the land or right of way in-between, it’s going to be prohibitively expensive. The reason that T1 lines are so affordable is because all the necessary elements needed to make the connection are already in place.

T1 lines are provisioned over common twisted pair copper telephone copper wiring found in multiple pair bundles called binder groups. This copper cable is run to nearly every business location during construction, since almost all business locations order landline telephone service. T1 service is delivered on 2 pair in the binder. Who owns the binder cable? It’s the incumbent local exchange carrier, the local phone company, that installed it. They actually make the service installation, although the lines may be leased and sold by a competitive service provider.

Those copper links to the central offices are often called the “first mile” or “last mile” connections. In between, the T1 signal may travel on copper or be multiplexed on a fiber optic service for long haul transmission. It might even be sent through a MPLS network owned by the competitive provider who has your T1 line contract. By the way, that MPLS service can be set up to connect 3 or more locations into a multipoint to multipoint network so they can all communicate with each other.

From a user standpoint, you can think of your T1 line as a dedicated digital “pipe” with a bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. There are no usage limits. This is your line full time. You can send as much or as little data through that pipe between locations as will fit at 1.5 Mbps. It’s inherently more secure than sending files over the Internet because you are the only user of that particular connection. You can elect to encrypt your data during transmission to make the connection even more secure.

T1 lines can carry voice, data, video or some combination of these. Most often, T1 lines are used as digital data connections for sending files between locations. They can also be used to provide branch offices with access to central servers and databases at headquarters. If 1.5 Mbps isn’t enough bandwidth, you can order bonded T1 to increase that to 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5, 9 or more Mbps.

Another popular use for point to point T1 lines is to interconnect PBX telephone systems. Each office may have its own self-sufficient phone system. When you tie them together with a T1 or T1 PRI line, your offices can talk to each other without having to pay any toll charges to the phone company.

Do you have a need to connect two or more business locations? Check out prices and availability for point to point T1 lines and other appropriate telecom services.



Note: Photo of Empire State Building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

ISDN's Primary Rate Interface

ISDN, the Integrated Services Digital Network, is a digital telephone standard that made voice and data services widely available long before the more recent deployment of Enterprise VoIP and MPLS networks. ISDN's Primary Rate Interface is more in demand today than ever. That's because it is tightly integrated with the installed base of telephone trunk lines that are almost universally available.

ISDN was the telcos' response to a change in technology that saw modems being installed on analog telephone lines to transfer data over long distances. The toll network was only designed for a limited voice bandwidth and tops out at about 56 Kbps when used as data bandwidth. In addition, analog modems use the same frequencies as telephone audio. You can use the line for data or voice, but only not both at the same time.

ISDN drew on existing digital carrier technology based on 64 Kbps channels. One channel can carry one telephone conversation, once the call is digitized using a CODEC or Coder / Decoder. These channels are the building blocks of T1, DS3, SONET and other digital carriers. The smallest unit is the DS0 which is a single 64 Kbps channel.

What ISDN did was to create two services for digitized voice and data. Note that once voice is digitized it actually is a data stream and can be carried by a digital trunk line side by side with computer data. Unlike VoIP, which consists of voice packets that all flow down the same line with data packets, ISDN keeps the voice and data channels separate.

The BRI or Basic Rate Interface consists of two 64 Kbps B or bearer channels plus one 16 Kbps D or delta channel. Each of the bearer channels can carry one telephone conversation or a 64 Kbps data link. The delta channel is used for signaling and other services such as Caller ID.

BRI was originally intended for residential and small business use. With a ISDN BRI connection you could have a telephone line and a 64 Kbps Internet connection, 2 telephone lines, or combined data of 128 Kbps. BRI was never widely adopted because other services such as DSL and Cable Internet became available with far greater bandwidths.

While BRI came too late to be a dominant digital line service, PRI or Primary Rate Interface has flourished. PRI consists of 23 bearer channels and 1 delta channel. Shorthand for this is 23 B + D. In this case all channels are 64 Kbps. The larger D channel can handle signaling for all 23 of the other channels. The total of 24 channels is exactly the right size for a T1 line, which is widely available. Thus, T1 lines are used to carry ISDN PRI. In this case, they are often called T1 PRI lines or T1 PRI service.

What has made T1 PRI such a popular service is that it is the perfect digital trunk to support PBX or Private Branch eXchange telephone systems used by businesses and call centers. Each T1 PRI line can replace up to 23 analog telephone lines. It's usually much more cost effective to order T1 PRI service than to bring in a dozen or more separate analog lines. Using the D channel to send signaling to the telephone company and receive Caller ID information results in faster call set-ups and disconnects, which can be important in busy call center operations.

Another popular use for T1 PRI has been to support modem banks. A dozen or more dial-up modems can be deployed by an Internet Service Provider at a single location and will communicate with the ISP via the T1 PRI connection. Each modem is supported by a single bearer channel.

Is ISDN PRI service priced right for your company? You can find out with a quick online price and availability search right now. Our friendly consultants will also be happy to review your needs and recommend the most cost effective solutions from a variety of competing carriers.

Fonality Call Center in a Box

Are you ready to start a new call center, but blanch at the up-front investment and set-up costs involved? A major call center is a major undertaking, but what if you simply want to add call center operations to your company or start small and grow as revenues increase? What you need is something simple, yet powerful. How about a call center in a box?

Fonality has just such a product. The box is actually an off-the-shelf PC tower running as a Linux server, which can be upgraded to a rack-mount server if you need the power. What turns a PC into a call center is the proprietary software and hardware interface cards.

The software that powers Fonality's PBXtra Call Center Edition is based on the popular Open Source Asterisk PBX software from Digium. You can get Asterisk software and third party interface cards and roll your own PBX, but you won't have what you get with Fonality. A good part of their value added is the modifications to the native Asterisk code that improve reliability & stability and add enterprise-class features in five different areas: Management software including a Web-based administration software and User Panel, easy integration of telecommuters, simple phone provisioning, system health monitoring, and LAN Interoperability with your existing network.

The other key piece in making a server into a PBX telephone system is the hardware interface. Fonality offers a range of plug-in cards that provide the signals necessary to operate analog telephones and telephone company lines. You have the option of using standard analog telephones or you can buy SIP-based VoIP phones from Fonality. Your phone service can be multiple analog phone lines, T1 / PRI digital phone lines with up to 96 channels, or SIP trunking service from a business grade VoIP carrier. A popular combination is to use VoIP phones within the call center and T1 / PRI voice lines for local and long distance calls.

The Fonality Call Center functions include everything you'd expect in a standard PBX telephone system, plus extras useful for call center operations. Unlimited call queues, full featured automatic call distribution, skills based routing, graphical queue reports, agent call recording, remote agents on cell phones or home analog phones, and support for unlimited VoIP providers are all included.

Most of the Call Center Edition upgrades to the PBXtra functionality is related to management and evaluation of call center agents. This product is intended to support from 2 to 200 agents, allowing you to start with a small phone order taking operation and expand to major catalog sales, customer support, or stand-alone call center services.

All this without the need for major in-house technical support. Fonality supplies its PBXtra and Call Center Edition servers pre-configured and ready to go. Phones also come pre-programmed to work with your system and are essentially plug and play. They include an Ethernet bridge so that a VoIP phone and desktop PC can share a single LAN connection.

If you are currently running a call center operation and would be interested in cost savings for your inbound and/or outbound calls, both local and long distance, our voice line telecommunications experts can negotiate among numerous carriers to get you the best per-minute rates.