T1 Line Cost At A New Low

Over the years, most companies have come to own T1 lines either sooner or later. Larger companies got them for dedicated Internet connections back when business was just getting acquainted with the Internet. Small operations often get into T1 lines after becoming frustrated with shared bandwidth information services, such as DSL and Cable. There’s only one thing not to like about T1 lines and that’s the cost... or is it?

If you think that T1 lines cost a small fortune, you probably remember getting a quote some time ago. Yes, less than a decade ago it wasn’t uncommon to pay $1,000 a month for a typical T1 line. I say typical because there are different flavors of T1 service and pricing has been very location dependent. Today, you might pay about a third of that in most locations nationwide.

Costs have plunged due to maturity of the service, deregulation that has opened the market to many more competitive carriers, and new technologies that now compete directly for your bandwidth dollar.

It’s never been a better time to get into T1 line service if it will meet your needs. Let’s take a look at how T1 lines work, what you can use them for, and how to decide if T1 or something else is the right service for your company.

T1 is one of the most mature telco technologies, developed by the Bell System for telephone trunking. T1 formed the basis of digital telephone service and later was pressed into service to transport data also. A half-century of experience means that T1 is well understood, almost universally available and well supported. As a tariffed telecom service, carriers take T1 seriously. Most are sold with an SLA or Service Level Agreement that spells out what you can expect in the way of availability, time to respond to an outage and mean time to repair.

T1 lines were designed to be provisioned on two pair of ordinary telephone wire. One pair is for transmit or upload. The other is for receive or download. This is a symmetrical bandwidth service. You get the same bandwidth in both directions and it is full duplex. You can transmit and receive at the same time. That was designed-in to support telephone conversations that are also full duplex.

The original use for T1 lines was telephone trunking. A trunk line supports multiple phone conversations. A T1 telephone line supports up to 24 separate conversations, each with its own synchronized channel. Think of these as individual business phone lines. A device called a channel bank can convert the 24 channels back and forth to 24 analog phone lines.

A more popular configuration of T1 telephone line is called ISDN PRI or T1 PRI. This also divides the T1 line into 24 channels but only 23 of them are used as phone lines. The last one is reserved for switching signals and data, such as Caller ID. ISDN PRI is very popular as a telephone trunk line that plugs directly into many PBX phone systems.

When used to transport data, the idea of channels is dispensed with and the entire payload of the line service is used to carry data packets. T1 has a payload of 1.536 Mbps. The actual line speed itself is 1.544 Mbps. The difference of 8 Kbps is overhead used to keep the line synchronized and for maintenance. A T1 line is typically said to provide 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth.

That bandwidth can be used to connect to the Internet in what is called DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. Dedicated means that you have exclusive use of the bandwidth at all times. Use as little or as much of it as you need. The remainder will still be available and not shared by other users.

T1 lines are also popular as point to point connections to link two business locations. A specialized use is to transmit digitized audio from radio station studios to rurally located transmitter sites. T1 is also the most popular backhaul technology that connects cellular wireless towers to telephone switching systems.

Has the cost of a T1 line come down enough to make it attractive for your business use? If so, you may also want to compare T1 against the newer Ethernet over Copper that typically offers twice the bandwidth for the same money. If EoC is available, it's an even better bargain. Get quotes now for EoC and T1 line services at your business locations.

20x20 Mbps Ethernet over Copper

You need bandwidth and a lot of it. So, call up your service provider and upgrade your account. Oh, you can’t do that? Is it because there are no facilities at the level you want or the cost is so astronomical that it isn’t worth considering? Have you considered 20x20 Mbps Ethernet over Copper?

What’s special about 20x20 EoC is that it offers an extraordinary level of bandwidth using only commonly available twisted pair copper cable. You get a symmetrical 20 Mbps upload and 20 Mbps download speed. This is a professional-grade WAN networking service that is highly reliable. Your bandwidth is dedicated to your applications and is not shared with other customers. It’s also full duplex, so you can upload and download at the same time using the full bandwidth available.

T1, the basic and most popular of the T-carrier services, offers just 1.5 Mbps delivered using 2 copper pair. You can upgrade that by adding more T1 lines with a binding process that combines their bandwidth. This works well up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. Then it becomes too expensive compared to other solutions.

The next logical upgrade is T3 or DS3, which are pretty much the same service these days. The bandwidth is an impressive 45 Mbps, but you won’t get that over twisted pair telco cable. You’ll almost certainly need to have a fiber optic connection. In some situations you may be able to get fixed location wireless at that bandwidth as long as you have a short line of site path between you and your provider.

What 20x20 Mbps Ethernet over Copper does is fill the gap between slower speed bonded T1 lines and higher speed fiber options. A bandwidth level of 20 Mbps is fast enough for many medium size companies to use for dedicated Internet access, file backup and restore, medical image transfer, computer aided design and manufacturing, video transport and similar demanding applications.

The way 20x20 Mbps EoC works is that it divides the bandwidth among multiple twisted pair wires in a binder group. The modulation scheme is chosen to minimize interference between the signal wires or even cancel out interference on the lines. One of the technical reasons that EoC is highly reliable is that no one pair carries the entire signal. If a wire breaks or the circuit connected to it fails, other pairs can continue to provide service, albeit at a reduced bandwidth level until repairs are made.

It sounds like 20x20 Mbps Ethernet over Copper is an almost ideal service, doesn’t it? It gets better. Mbps for Mbps, Carrier Ethernet services tend to be less expensive than their legacy telecom competitors, including T1 and DS3. The one caveat is that EoC isn’t universally available as of yet. It’s primarily a Metro Ethernet service found in cities and suburban areas, with very little rural service. There are distance limitations to the technology. You need to be within a few miles of a carrier POP (Point of Presence) to get Ethernet over Copper services.

What about higher bandwidths? EoC is most popular in the range of 2 Mbps up to 20 Mbps. Very near provider offices, speeds up to 45 Mbps might be available. Above that, you are going to need fiber run into your building. This is not necessarily a budget breaker. Some competitive providers anxious to acquire fiber optic business will subsidize or even fully cover the cost of a fiber optic buildout if you order significant bandwidth.

Are you in need of higher bandwidth but unsure about availability and costs? Find out quickly and easily if you can get 20x20 Mbps Ethernet over Copper or other high bandwidth services at very affordable prices.

USB 3.0 Offers Gbps Data Transfers

USB nearly fulfilled the promise of its name to be the universal serial bus when USB 2.0 replaced 1.1 as the computer standard. The introduction of USB 3.0, also called “SuperSpeed”, looks to increase that domination with a 10x speed increase.

What’s wrong with the current 480 Mbps USB speed? Nothing at all for many peripheral devices. It sure beat the 1.5 to 12 Mbps capability of the original USB 1.0 and made USB practical for things like video transfers from camcorders. Most video cameras now have a mini-USB connector in place of the FireWire interface that was thought to be the high speed option.

But look at what you get with USB 3.0. The speed goes up by a factor of 10x to 4.8 Gbps. In practice, you can expect to get around 3.2 Gbps or 400 MB per second through a 3.0 interface. That’s the transfer mode they are calling SuperSpeed. If you have a computer and a video camera that both sport USB 3.0 interfaces and a cable rated for the new spec, you can enjoy that truly super speed transfer mode. But like the USB 2.0 upgrade before it, USB 3.0 is compatible with the earlier USB interfaces. You can even use your old cables and they’ll work just fine.

So what’s the magic behind SuperSpeed and why do you need a different cable? In order to get that screaming performance that can approach 5 Gbps, USB 3.0 adds additional signal wires. USB 3.0 cables have the same power and ground wires, the same 2 wires for non-SuperSpeed data, and 4 more wires for SuperSpeed. Those four wires are configured as two differential pairs, allowing USB to upgrade from half-duplex to full duplex operation. That means communications in both directions at the same time. The connectors on the cables and receptacles change so that USB 2.0 cables won’t connect with the extra SuperSpeed connections.

The signaling protocol itself has also been enhanced so that SuperSpeed can establish a direct connection or communications “pipe” between host and peripheral instead of broadcasting all data to all devices on the bus. Bulk transfer is improved by allowing multiple streams of data through a single bulk pipe.

You know that USB has become a power bus as well as a data bus for many small devices. You expect to be able to charge your iPod or MP3 player while you are uploading new songs. There are even gadgets like personal fans or gooseneck LED lamps that have no data function. They just use the power provided by an open USB port. Most ridiculous is the USB coffee warmer or blanket. Well, USB 3.0 won’t put an end to any of that. In fact, the bus power available has been increased from 100 mA to 150 mA for unconfigured devices and from 500 mA to 900 mA for configured devices. Now higher power devices can get by without the inconvenience of an extra wall wart power supply.

USB 3.0 is just starting deployment, so don’t expect every device you see on the shelf to be sporting this interface. However, you can bet that PC makers will be taking note and adding this capability as a way of distinguishing their products, just like Blu-ray drives have moved into high end products. External drive manufacturers and camcorder companies also have a lot to gain from the higher transfer speeds of USB 3.0. If video is the killer app, then USB 3.0 is going to be a major enabler.

What Is The Real T1 Line Speed?

When we talk about a T1 line, we’re talking about a dedicated bandwidth connection that runs at 1.5 Mbps in both directions, upload and download. But is it exactly 1.5 Mbps or something in that range?

The 1.5 Mbps designation is a shorthand. The T1 line actually runs at a bit rate of 1.544 Mbps. But you don’t get to use all of that. The bandwidth that is available for your use, called the payload, is 1.536 Mbps.

So, why the odd numbers and where does the rest of the bandwidth go? To understand that, we need to deconstruct the T1 line and see what’s going on in there. A little history will also provided some valuable insights.

T1 is one of several technical specifications for a family of services known at T-carrier. It’s an invention of Bell Labs that was originally meant for the phone companies. Back in the 1950’s all phone lines were either analog copper or analog signals riding on radio carriers in a process called frequency division multiplexing. It worked something like the AM radio band today. If each telephone call is like a radio station, then the radio band can hold lots of different stations assigned to different channels. You pick the one you want to listen by selecting the proper frequency or channel.

As you know, analog based frequency division multiplexing has its limitations. Stations interfere and there is often atmospheric noise. If you remember making long distance calls 40 or 50 years ago, you’ll also remember that there was a lot of hiss and you could sometimes hear other calls interfering through a process called cross-talk. Those effects went away when digital telephony was installed.

T1 lines use standard twisted pair copper wiring but the signals are digital, not analog. It starts with a stream of bits arranged as 24 channels of 8 bits each, being sampled at 8 KHz, for a total of 64 Kbps per channel. Multiply 24 channels by 64 Kbps and you get 1,536 Kbps or 1.536 Mbps. Aha! That’s the payload value of a T1 line.

What’s important about having so many 64 Kbps channels? It turns out that each 64 Kbps channel is exactly the right size to carry one telephone call. The channels are each designated DS0 and the collection of 24 is called a DS1.

That all makes sense, considering the telephone company heritage of the T1 line. But what causes the difference between a 1.544 Mbps line rate and a 1.536 Kbps payload?

Subtract those two numbers and you get 8 Kbps. Those 8,000 bits per second are the overhead needed to run the line. T1 lines are precisely synchronized at both ends so the terminal equipment knows where the channels are in the bitstream. It’s actually one framing bit in a total frame of 193 bits being sampled 8,000 times per second. That one bit per frame keeps everything in lock-step and is also used to support error detection and notification.

So, when you hear that you’re getting 1.5 Mbps bandwidth on a T1 line you now know that your actual usable bandwidth is 1.536 Mbps. More importantly, it’s a full duplex service offering both upload and download bandwidth of 1.536 Mbps. That bandwidth is maintained by the line at all times for your exclusive use. Whatever you aren’t using at the moment idles while waiting for the next payload bits.

What can you do with a T1 line? They are the most popular digital business connection for point to point data connections, broadband Internet, digital telephone service or a combined voice and data service called Integrated T1. How much does it cost to get one of these highly reliable services for your business? Check T1 line prices and availability for your location now.