T1 Phone Lines Offer More For Less

Once your business gets big enough that the telephone bill is a significant part of your monthly expenses, you may be ready for a higher volume, lower cost service. That's especially true if you have started a dedicated contact center for your customers or have grown to a dozen or more outside lines.

The service you'll be interested in is called a T1 telephone line. A T1 "line" is a digital telephone trunk as opposed to a single telephone line. What trunk means is a group of phone lines all bundled electronically into a single line. If you order your phone lines one at a time, as most growing companies do, you'll get individual analog lines with local dial tone and perhaps long distance service. Each line is independent of the others. You select the line you want with a multi-line phone or key telephone system. Or, your PBX system will automatically pick one for you.

T1 telephone lines come bundled up to 23 or 24 to a T1 line. Each line is still independent and can be configured for local and/or long distance service, incoming or outgoing or both, depending on your needs. What T1 telephone service does is offer a volume discount compared to just adding more and more analog phone lines.

Do T1 lines connect to your phones the same as conventional analog phone lines? Not exactly. You need something to perform the conversion between analog and digital formats. If all you want to do is consolidate a bunch of analog phone lines that feed a bunch of analog handsets, a device called a "channel bank" will do the job for you. The T1 line feeds into one side of the channel bank and up to 24 individual phone lines come out the other side.

Most of the time, if you have a dozen or more phone lines you probably have a PBX telephone system in-house. The PBX or the newer IP PBX systems have gotten small and inexpensive compared to the closet full of equipment they used to be. Many newer systems come with a T1 line interface or can be ordered with that configuration. If your existing PBX system doesn't have T1 line capability, you can usually order a plug-in card that will make the connection.

There's something else you need to know about T1 phone lines. There are two types. The original configuration is a channelized T1 line with 24 individual channels, one to transport each telephone line. A newer arrangement is the T1 PRI or ISDN PRI. PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface. This is the most popular version of T1 phone service because it offers up to 23 telephone lines plus Caller ID information and faster call switching. Most PBX and IP PBX phone systems can handle T1 PRI as well as conventional channelized T1 lines.

Because of their economy of scale in combining multiple phone lines into a single digital trunk, T1 phone lines can offer you more capability for less money. How much more for how much less? That depends on how you want your service configured. There are often limited time special offers from competitive carriers that can make the line lease cost even more attractive. Find out how much you can benefit from the most competitive offers on T1 phone lines now.

T-1 Digital Phone Lines For PBX Systems

Most business telephone systems that have more than a few outside lines now use T-1 trunk lines to connect from your building to the local telephone office. Why? Because the value in consolidating many individual phone lines into a single or a couple of T-1 lines makes digital lines more cost effective than a collection of analog phone lines. This is true regardless of whether your in-house phone system uses analog or digital phones. Even most VoIP based phone systems terminate calls in T-1 telephone lines.

Very simple one and two line phones or key telephone systems with 4 to 6 outside lines are set up for analog phone lines. The simple VoIP services use an analog phone adapter to connect to DSL broadband service to provide 1 or 2 lines. That's pretty much the extent of what you can do with these simple systems. Once you get more than a half-dozen outside phone lines, you should be looking at T-1 service as a cost saver.

There are several flavors of T-1 line services to be aware of. A standard T-1 telephone trunk offers up to 24 individual phone lines all digitized and multiplexed into two pair of copper wires that connect back to the telco central office. Your PBX system needs a T-1 interface card to connect to a T-1 line. These are pretty much a standard option for any new PBX phone system and you can likely order a plug-in T-1 card for older systems.

A variation on the T-1 line is called an ISDN PRI or T-1 PRI phone line. PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface and it's part of the ISDN or Integrated Services Digital Network specifications. A regular channelized T-1 line and a T-1 PRI line are pretty much the same animal, with one important difference. PRI lines offer 23 rather than 24 phone lines and use the remaining channel to provide signaling and data. You need a PRI line if you want Caller ID for your phones.

Another variation is called T-1 Integrated service. Integrated means that the line carries both telephone calls and Internet data. That's right, you can split a T-1 line so that you can have a dozen outside phone lines plus broadband Internet service coming in on the same line. This is quite a cost saver for most small businesses that need both phone and reliable Internet service. Some of these Integrated services are called dynamic T-1 lines because they automatically assign all the bandwidth not needed for active phone calls to the Internet service.

What about VoIP phone systems? Most Enterprise VoIP phone systems use IP telephony within the company so that the phones can connect to the IP PBX system using standard Ethernet cabling. Many use the same LAN as the company's computers to save on wiring costs. All the in-house calls go from phone to phone over the network. But outside calls still have to connect or terminate to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Most often that interface is within the IP PBX system or voice gateway. The most common phone line interface is the T-1 or T-1 PRI digital phone line, just like conventional PBX systems.

Another option that's not quite as widely deployed is to connect your phones to a VoIP service provider in IP format directly from your network. The service provider takes care of terminating calls to the PSTN. The network connection from your company to the service provider is called a SIP Trunk and is most often a type of T-1 line set up to be unchannelized to transport voice packets.

You should know that T-1 line prices are lower now than they've ever been. If you're still using analog phone lines connected to your PBX telephone system, it may well be worth your while to convert to one or more T-1 or T-1 PRI lines. If you already have T-1 service, then you should get a competitive quote to see how much you might save on your next contract. Simply enter a quick online quote request at T1 Rex.