Escape the High Cost of Bonded T1 Lines

By: John Shepler

The T1 line was the first professional-grade digital communications pipe. Over a half-century later, it is still widely used for point to point private lines and for PRI telephone trunking. It also makes an excellent first mile link for dedicated Internet access for small business. While the price of T1 lines have dropped dramatically over the years, it can still be a pricey solution, especially if you need to bond several together to get enough bandwidth. Are there any good alternatives?

The Good and the Bad of T1 Lines
At first, T1 lines were the only game in town. Once fiber became available with much higher bandwidth, T1 still had a cost advantage in the days before broadband everything. Would you believe that 1.5 Mbps was pretty impressive back in the day? It’s a symmetrical 1.5 Mbps. That’s the same speed in both directions. It’s also full duplex or both directions at the same time. T1 is a dedicated line. You have all the bandwidth and if you don’t use it, it just sits there idle until you do.

Bonded T1 Lines Increase Speed
Bonding is a process of making big lines out of little ones. If you bond two T1 lines, you get 3 Mbps. Four lines gets you 6 Mbps. Six lines and you have a respectable 9 Mbps. I understand that in the wilds of Alaska they’ll bond 8 or 10 lines together. That’s about the limit.

Now, the downside. Those 2, 4 or 6 bonded lines cost 2, 4 or 6 times as much as one T1 line. There’s no economy of scale. At, say, several hundred dollars a month each, that’s gets pretty pricey pretty fast. For that much money, why not just get a fiber optic connection?

Fiber Instead of Copper
Fiber, indeed. A nice side effect of the big telecom move to 4G LTE and 5G wireless is that the T1 lines they used to run to cell towers can’t possibly deliver the bandwidth. So, there has been a big buildout of fiber to the tower along with wireless fiber, also known as microwave transmission. That means that fiber service is far more available than it used to be. It’s also a lot less expensive due to increased competition from new providers and a technology switch from SONET to Carrier Ethernet. If you haven’t checked out fiber pricing and availability in awhile, you may be surprised at what has popped up while you weren’t looking.

Keep the Copper, But Use Ethernet
All that twisted pair copper in the ground can still be used to deliver decent bandwidths by bonding it for Ethernet over Copper instead of T1. EoC is a different technology and can deliver 10 or 20 Mbps easily. The downside is that bandwidth falls off rapidly with distance. This approach works best in populated areas where a telco office isn’t far away. If you can get it, Ethernet over Copper is very affordable and gives you the performance of bonded T1 at a fraction of the cost per Mbps.

How About Cable?
I’m amazed how many times prospective customers ask for gigabit fiber or dark fiber but wind up buying cable broadband. Why? Cable has a tremendous cost advantage. You can often get fiber bandwidths at T1 prices and most service levels are easily afforded by any business. The bandwidth is shared, not dedicated. It’s also asymmetrical, meaning that the download speed can be ten times the upload speed or more. These may or may not be issues, depending on how you use the service. Some applications just won’t tolerate anything but a private line. Most everything we do everyday isn’t that demanding. Many cable services have consistently high bandwidth and low latency. What hiccups there are tend to be transitory and long term outages have become rare on the major service providers.

Mix and Match
To get the right combination of performance and cost, you might want to consider a combination of services. For VoIP telephony and maybe business processes in the cloud, get a dedicated T1 or fiber connection. For general Internet use or customer WiFi, business cable broadband gives you a lot of performance for the price. Run the networks separately or use an SD-WAN system to intelligently direct traffic.

What bandwidth options are best for your business? Get pricing and availability on a wide variety of bandwidth services now so you can make the best decision and perhaps save considerable cost as well.

Telecommunication DS3 Affordable For Business

Businesses today are looking for higher and higher bandwidths to support higher productivity computer-based processes. What do you do when your T1 line is maxed out and you still need more bandwidth?

If your needs are incremental and you’ve slowly used up the margin in your T1 bandwidth, the next logical step is to have a second T1 line bonded with the first. That gives you a WAN connection with 2x the capacity or twice the 1.5 Mbps that T1 service offers. A 2x bonded T1 ups your bandwidth to 3 Mbps. You can continue this process by bonding in additional T1 lines to get 3x, 4x, 5x and so on. Additional bonding is technically possible, but above this level another T-carrier service starts to be more cost effective. That’s T3 or DS3 service.

DS3 stands for Digital Signal 3 or digital signal level 3. It’s a technical designation for the characteristics of a TDM or Time Division Multiplexed digital signal service running at 44.736 Mbps. This is typically called 45 Mbps service. T1 lines have a similar specification called DS1.

How fast is DS3 compared to DS1? DS3 can transport 28 DS1 level signals. That’s the equivalent of bonding 28 T1 lines.

But you are not going to pay the cost of 28 T1 lines to have DS3 service. In fact, your monthly lease price is only a fraction of that. Exactly how much? You’ll need to check DS3 availability and pricing for your business address to find that out.

DS3 pricing is location dependent. The cost is determined by the distance from your business to the nearest carrier POP or Point of Presence. It’s also influenced by how built-out high speed data services are on that route. If there is fiber optic service already installed in your building or one nearby, you’ll have more service options and likely better pricing that if you are in an isolated location.

The termination for DS3 is copper-based. But the service itself can be provided over copper, fiber optic cable, or even wireless. DS3 over copper is often called a T3 line or T3 carrier.

There is another option available in metropolitan areas that gives you DS3 speeds of 45 Mbps at even lower costs. This is Ethernet over Copper or EoC. It’s a fairly new service, but one that is expanding rapidly for business users. Lower bandwidths are also available. Check Ethernet over Copper availability for your business location now.

Cheaper DS3 Connections

You need higher bandwidth for your business operations, but the cost of DS3 is killing you. If you are running out of capacity on your T1 line and looking to upgrade, you may wince at even the thought of a DS3 line lease. Well, relax. DS3 connections are cheaper than they've ever been. Even in these challenging economic times, you may well be able to afford the DS3 connection you need.

DS3 or Data Service level 3 is a standard digital telecommunications service first developed for telephone trunking applications. It is standardized as part of the T-Carrier system, and works seemlessly with SONET fiber optic carriers. DS3 is nominally a 45 Mbps line service. Once provisioned on coaxial copper cable, most DS3 connections now come in on fiber optic cables. A single DS3 uses only a fraction of the capability of the fiber, but it can be multiplexed with other DS3s and transported cross country with ease.

What does one use DS3 for? Larger companies will use a DS3 dedicated Internet connection to serve dozens or even hundreds of employees. Configured as a digital telephone trunk, a single DS3 connection will support up to 672 simultaneous telephone calls. Who makes that many? A large corporation or a major call center can easily make good use of DS3 telephone service.

How much does a DS3 connection cost? You'll see nominal quotes of $5,000 a month. But you may well pay half that, depending on your location and lease length. The more densely populated your business location, the more likely it is that DS3 service will be available and the more competitive the pricing among multiple providers. You can get a DS3 quote in less than a minute online for business addresses.

What if a fiber optic drop is not really cost effective for your location? There is another service available, called EoC or Ethernet over Copper that is becoming very popular in metropolitan areas. Bandwidth varies with distance from the carrier's POP or Point of Presence, but can range up to DS3 levels of 45 Mbps. Get a quote on Ethernet over Copper bandwidth. If available, this service is generally cheaper than DS3 on a Mbps basis.

Finally, if your business is out in the boonies where fiber has not dared to tread, there are still voice and data connections available to you. Bonded T1 lines can deliver 10 Mbps or more using multiple pair of ordinary telephone cable. Since you can select the number of lines to bond, you can control the cost of your service to match your needs and budget and upgrade as demand grows. Get a quote on bonded T1 service for your location and see how affordable it really is.