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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DS3 and Fractional DS3 Broadband

In the quest to upgrade bandwidth, companies have generally turned to DS3 bandwidth service. Here is what DS3 is all about and the different technologies used to provide DS3 and similar mid-level bandwidth services.

DS3 stands for Digital Signal 3, a standardized switched circuit TDM telecom service. As a refresher, DS0 is the basic building block at 64 Kbps. That’s one channel of digitized telephone call. DS1 is a bundle of 24 DS0 channels at 1.5 Mbps. You are probably more familiar with its implementation as a line service called T1. DS3 is the next step up at 45 Mbps. It’s a bundle of 672 DS0 channels as a large telephone trunk or 28 T1 lines multiplexed together for transport. When you order a T3 line, you are getting the line service implementation of DS3.

Even though DS1 and DS3 were originally conceived as telephone company technologies, they are more often used to transport data packets today. That includes private point to point lines and dedicated Internet connections. In these applications, the entire payload is used to transport data packets.

A full DS3 circuit will give you 45 Mbps bandwidth in both the upload and download directions. This is the most common service ordered and is readily available nationwide. You’ll need an interface card for your router to connect to a DS3 termination. There are two interconnect cables, one for transmit (upload) and one for receive (download). They are 75 ohm coax, similar to what you’ll find for Cable TV connections, although the specified cable type is Bellcore 734 or 735 for this application. The connectors are type BNC. You’ll find these on the router interface card. There may be more than one pair if the router can handle multiple DS3 connections.

At this point, you might be imagining coaxial cables stretched from your building back to the telephone central office, like the twisted pairs used for T1 and multi-line telephone service. In practice, the coaxial connection is only used for short distances. The DS3 bandwidth itself is most often delivered over a SONET fiber optic cable, where it is demultiplexed and dropped off at your premises.

DS3 bandwidth may be higher than you require. There’s a big gap between T1 line bandwidth at 1.5 Mbps and DS3 at 45 Mbps. Companies often begin scaling up their bandwidth by bonding multiple T1 lines to double or triple the individual line bandwidth. This works up to about 10 or 12 Mbps in most cases. Let’s say you only need 20 or 30 Mbps right now. What do you do?

One option is to order fractional DS3 service. A full DS3 interface is installed, but the line bandwidth is limited to the fractional amount you order. That could be 15, 20 or 30 Mbps. You can possibly save money this way, but not necessarily. The reason is that full DS3 is more of a standard service that is readily available. The fractional services are a special order that may or may not be available in a particular location, depending on the service provider. In the end, it might make the most economic sense to get a full DS3 connection.

There are other technical options in this bandwidth range that compete with fractional and even full DS3. The most popular is Ethernet over Copper. This is a highly scalable service that competes with T1 at the 1.5, 2, and 3 Mbps levels. You can also get 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 50, and sometimes even 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. This lets you match your budget more closely to the bandwidth you require. Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is often less expensive than either T1 or DS3 for similar bandwidths, although not as readily available as yet.

Downtown in major business districts you may also find fixed wireless bandwidth services. These often deliver DS3 bandwidths, but perhaps in an Ethernet protocol. Most of the time that’s what you want anyway, since you’ll be connecting to a LAN running Ethernet.

A final option isn’t DS3, but might give you a similar benefit for a lot less money. That’s business class Cable broadband. It is shared, not dedicated, and the bandwidth varies with the amount of user activity. Still, you can get up to 50 or 100 Mbps download with 5 or 10 Mbps upload service for about the price of a T1 line. You’ll need to have the cable passing by your business location for this service to be available. Otherwise the construction costs are prohibitive.

Are you in need of higher bandwidth to support your growing business, additional computerization or a move to cloud services? If so, get pricing and availability for DS3 and fractional DS3 services, plus related bandwidth services that may also meet your needs.

Ethernet over Copper Is The New Telephone Line

Twisted pair copper has been the standard way to connect telephone service for over 100 years. Guess what the latest in telephone line technology is? Why, it’s twisted pair copper!

You might see this as an example of “everything old is new again,” but this technology is a twist on the old twisted pair. While analog signals defined telephony in its first century, digital will rule the next century. What remains the same is the actual physical copper wireline.

Why does this make sense in an age of fiber optic communications? It’s a matter of economics. If we were made out of money, the thing to do would be to rip up all that copper in the ground and replace it with unlimited bandwidth glass fibers. But we’re not made of money and it turns out that voice-grade copper line has far more capability that we ever thought possible.

When we think of the copper phone wires that come into our homes and businesses, we think of telephone handsets for talking and 56 Kbps modems for our computers. That was last century’s technology. By switching from analog to digital transmission, you can have business grade telephone service and broadband up to 20 Mbps on those same copper phone lines.

How is this different from DSL? DSL is actually a hybrid of analog telephony with digital data sharing the same line at frequencies beyond the range of human hearing. It’s a way for residential and small business users to add broadband Internet service to their existing phone line. As a "best effort" information service, DSL was designed to optimize cost and has some well known performance and availability issues.

This is something different. It is based on Ethernet over Copper technology that bonds multiple dry copper pair to deliver a highly reliable and solid bandwidth all-digital signal to business locations only. It’s not a residential service. It’s intended for businesses that require a robust voice and data service similar to what they may be getting from an Integrated T1 line.

TelePacific, a major competitive carrier serving California and Nevada, calls their service SmartVoice. It’s an enterprise VoIP telephone service using SIP signaling. This voice service is combined with either dedicated broadband Internet access or MPLS network service. You would choose broadband to have both telephone and Internet brought in on the same line. You’d choose MPLS to link multiple business locations for both telephone and data exchange.

TelePacific maintains high voice quality by dynamically integrating the voice and data traffic on the line. Lower grade VoIP services simply use a broadband line for both telephone and computers. When data traffic gets high, voice quality suffers and calls can even be dropped. Dynamic line service actively manages packet priority so that telephone calls have priority and get the bandwidth they need for best operation. The remaining line bandwidth is assigned to data transmission. You are far less likely to notice or be annoyed by small variation in data rates than garbled and broken conversations. Once a phone call is finished, the bandwidth it had been using is reassigned automatically to the bandwidth pool for data. That’s the dynamic aspect to the technology.

What advantages does Ethernet over Copper have over the older Integrated T1 line service? Lower cost is one big advantage. EoC is lower in cost and offers more bandwidth options. You can typically get 1 to 20 Mbps bandwidth with EoC. T1 lines are fixed at 1.5 Mbps, although they can be bonded to deliver higher speeds.

Is Ethernet over Copper voice or data service the best cost/performance option for your company? You may be missing out on a major cost savings, so check Ethernet over Copper prices and availability now.



Photo of Thomas Edison courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

T1 Broadband For Rural Business

Rural broadband is the subject of government stimulus dollars. It’s widely accepted that rural residential broadband users have been generally ignored by service providers due to low population densities. But what about businesses in rural areas? Are they also bandwidth starved?

For the most part, there is no reason that a business in rural America need be deprived of broadband Internet access any more than they are deprived of multi-line telephone service. In fact, the same copper pair that transport telephone calls are also used to bring in broadband service.

Now, it’s true that low cost business DSL services are largely unavailable much beyond city limits. That’s because DSL is a distance limited technology. It’s very fast near the telephone company central office and drops off in speed as line length increases. Beyond a few miles there just isn’t anything left.

That problem doesn’t plague T1 lines. T1 service also uses twisted copper pair, usually in the same bundle with lines providing telephone service to business and residential users. But T1 was designed as a long-haul service to begin with. It is the foundation technology that telephone companies used to transform their office to office connections from analog to digital. Yes, the high frequency signals used by T1 do degrade with distance. But unlike DSL, T1 signals can be regenerated every mile or so to make them good as new.

If your business is located out in the sticks, you should still be able to get T1 service. T1 lines can bring in as many as 24 telephone calls for your PBX telephone system. They can provide a private point to point connection between multiple business locations. Or they can carry broadband Internet service at 1.5 Mbps for both upload and download. Note that T1 service is symmetrical. The upload and download speeds are the same. That’s almost never true with consumer broadband or many business DSL services.

While 1.5 Mbps is more than adequate for many small businesses, what if you need more? That’s also possible through a process called bonding. Bonding T1 lines together combines their bandwidth. For instance, with 2 T1 lines you get 2x the bandwidth or 3 Mbps. With 3 lines it moves up to 4.5 Mbps. Bonding 4 T1 lines gives you 6 Mbps, and so on. The practical limit to this is somewhere around 10 to 12 Mbps.

You should also be aware that Ethernet broadband services may be available in your area. Ethernet over DS1 or EoDS1 basically turns T1 lines into Ethernet transport lines. It’s not a universally available service at this time, but there might be cost or performance advantages if you can get it.

How much does all of this cost? Much less than ever before and perhaps a lot less than you’ve been thinking. There’s a good way to find out for sure. Get quotes for T1 and Ethernet broadband now. You may be surprised at your options.