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.



Note: Products with the humorous theme "Wan Man" shown on this page are available through the Gigapacket Zazzle Store.

Ethernet over Copper Distance Sensitivity

The availability of Ethernet over Copper (EoC) line service has opened up a suite of new bandwidth levels to businesses not yet connected with fiber optic cabling from their service provider. In additional to breaking the speed barrier imposed by T1 lines, EoC is easily scalable and often the low cost solution for professional bandwidth. So, what’s not to like?

There are a couple of limitations holding back universal adoption of Ethernet over Copper technology. First is that appropriate terminal equipment must be installed at the telco central office (CO) where the other end of your twisted pair copper lines are connected. This is similar to what is used for T1 and DSL, but unique to EoC. Many, but not all, COs are equipped to provide Ethernet service.

The second limitation of Ethernet over Copper is distance. T1 technology was developed by the telephone industry to provide phone line trunking between switching centers. Provisions were made for T1 specific signal regenerators to allow T1 service to stretch just about any distance from the CO. It’s still popular for business broadband in rural areas where nothing else is available. EoC is more like DSL. The bandwidth you can get decreases rapidly with how far away you are from the central office. If the CO is just down the street, you may be able to get bandwidth that rivals entry level fiber optic service. A mile or more away, your choices will be limited. Several miles away, the signal is unusable and service is unavailable.

This distance limitation isn’t a deal breaker for most business. Most locations are within a few thousand feet of the nearest CO. That’s likely the one that connects your wiring. It’s in developed areas at the edge of town or out in the country that EoC service gets dicey.

How much bandwidth are we talking about. You know that a T1 line gives you 1.5 Mbps. Entry level Ethernet over Copper service generally starts at 3 Mbps. You can go lower in some cases, but here’s another advantage of Ethernet. That 3 Mbps will probably cost you the same at your old 1.5 Mbps service. Twice the bandwidth for the same money.

The cost savings are even more dramatic as you go up in bandwidth. Many companies installed bonded T1 lines before the advent of EoC. For instance, you can get that same 3 Mbps bandwidth by bonding two T1 lines so that they act as one larger pipe. This process can be expanded by adding more T1 lines to further increase the available bandwidth. The practical limit is around 8 lines to provide 12 Mbps.

Now, 12 Mbps is as much as many smaller companies need right now. One strategy is to start by bonding two T1 lines to double your throughput. Then add more lines as your bandwidth needs increase. This is preferable to having to pay for more bandwidth than you can make good use of. The one thing to remember is that you need to get all of your T1 lines from the same provider so that they can be bonded on both end of the circuit.

EoC at 10 or 12 Mbps is also fairly easy to obtain at most business locations. Why choose this approach? You know you can cut the cost in half by simply switching to EoC rather than double bonding T1 lines. The cost savings get even more dramatic as bandwidth goes up. A 12 Mbps EoC service might cost you two to three times what you pay for 3 Mbps. The same 12 Mbps obtained from bonded T1 lines might cost as much as 8x as much as a single line. That’s because there is no economy of scale with T1. Each line has a cost associated with it, so you just multiply the number of lines time the price of each line to get your lease price. Some carriers will discount bonded service to make it more attractive. Even so, EoC will almost always be the low cost solution compared to bonded T1.

Just how much bandwidth can you get from Ethernet over Copper technology? You’ll easily get 10 or 12 Mbps. It’s not uncommon for businesses to increase that to 20 or 30 Mbps. The upper limit is generally around 45 to 50 Mbps, and that’s only available for locations near the CO. In some cases, you may be even able to get 100 Mbps or more EoC. That’s about where SONET fiber optic service starts at 155 Mbps.

Has this discussion got you interested in higher bandwidth services for less money? You don’t even have to know how far your CO is from your building or how long the wire run is. There’s a service that will automatically figure this out based on your location and business phone number. You’ll get an instant online price quote that will be pretty accurate even without further information. Go ahead, try the automated GeoQuote Ethernet Bandwidth service and see what you can get and how much it will cost. If you like, you can request support from a product specialist to see if there are any special cost savings deals available right now or discuss the specifics of your needs. Please note that this only works for business addresses and not residential locations.

Point to Point Dedicated T1

A classic telecom service that is still going strong is point to point dedicated T1 service. Let’s have a look at how it works and what you can use it for.

T1 lines were originally developed by the telephone companies for their own use. The idea was to consolidate 24 separate analog phone lines into a single digital trunk. The key features were serial digital transmission over no more than two twisted pair, regeneration to extend transmission distance indefinitely, nailed-up private line connections between two locations, a multiplexing scheme to keep the 24 simultaneous conversations separate and distinct, and a line speed of 1.5 Mbps.

This legacy service is still widely available and is called T1 telephone or T1 CAS for Channel Associated Signaling. It is used to connect business PBX telephone systems to telephone service providers for outside lines. Most businesses can get easily get by with 24 outside lines, so only a single T1 line is needed. There is a newer version of this service called ISDN PRI or T1 PRI for Primary Rate Interface. The underlying T1 line works the same. What’s different is that one channel is reserved for switching, dialing and data such as ANI or Caller ID. That leaves 23 outside telephone lines on one T1 PRI, still right for most small and medium businesses. Larger companies and telephone intensive businesses such as call centers can order multiple T1 PRI lines to gain more outside phone lines.

The designated T1 line speed of 1.5 Mbps, chosen to support existing telephone infrastructure, made it very attractive as a way to connect businesses to the Internet and for connecting company networks across long distances. Companies became more and more computerized with terminals and later PCs on every desktop. Internal networks eventually standardized on Ethernet as a network protocol and speeds increased to 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1,000 Mbps. In the early days, even larger companies used dial-up modems for file transfers. Dedicated lines ran at 64 Kbps and 128 Kbps. That was fine when data files were small, few and far between. It wouldn’t work anymore when data moved from paper to disk files.

The trick to using a telephone-inteneded technology as a digital private line is to treat the entire line bandwidth as a single entity and ignore the 8 bit increments that define individual telephone channels. This is a clear channel pipe arrangement. You’ll need a router to connect to your network and a T1 interface card for the router. Plug this into the T1 “smart jack” installed by the service provider at each end of the line and you’ve got a 1.5 Mbps data connection.

A valuable characteristic of point to point T1 data lines is that they are permanently connected or “nailed up.” The actual wires, one or two twisted pair of telco wiring, are assigned to your T1 line and nothing else. No one else can gain access like they might on the Internet. This is what makes the dedicated line both dedicated to your use and private. The line goes from point A to point B and nowhere else.

What if you want to connect to another location? You can either cancel the T1 line you have now and get a new one going to that other location, or add another T1 line so you can connect to both the current and new location. You can add as many T1 lines as you like, but they all only go between two locations. What some companies do is create their own private network by running point to point dedicated T1 lines from each branch office back to headquarters. Then they set up a star network with HQ managing all traffic between the branches and headquarters and from one branch to another.

What if you like the idea of dedicated point to point service but really need more than 1.5 Mbps? That can be achieved by bonding T1 lines to double, triple or gain up to 12 Mbps of line speed. You can also use T3 lines (DS3 bandwidth) instead of T1 for 45 Mbps of bandwidth or SONET fiber optic lines starting at 155 Mbps. An alternative is Carrier Ethernet E-Line which gives you point to point Ethernet connections from 2 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps.

Can your business make good use of point to point dedicated T1 lines or higher bandwidth services? If so, get prices and availability on the line services right for your company.




Note: Picture of twisted pair cable courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Increasing T1 Speed

T1 lines have been the mainstay of business network connections to the outside world for decades. In the beginning they offered more bandwidth than most companies could use. Now, like computer memory and processing speed, what used to be plenty is no longer nearly enough. So, what do you do? Do you have to bite the bullet and pay up for fiber? Not by a long shot.

The traditional upgrade path works for many companies. That’s a move up from T1 speed to T3 speed. T1 lines run at 1.5 Mbps. T3 runs at 45 Mbps. It’s a substantial move up and carries a substantial premium, although T3 doesn’t cost nearly what it used to.

If you want more speed than 1.5 Mbps but don’t need to go as high as 45 Mbps, there are now options to get incremental bandwidths delivered over twisted pair copper. The two competing technologies are T1 line bonding and Ethernet over Copper (EoC). T1 line bonding simply combines the bandwidth of two or more T1 lines into a single faster line. Ethernet over Copper uses a different modulation technology to deliver higher speed services.

Let’s take a look at bonded T1. If you decide to bond two T1 lines, you double the bandwidth from 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps. To do this, you need to order bonded T1 service from a single provider. Having two different providers won’t work. Each T1 line will come in on 1 or 2 copper pairs in your telecom cable bundle. This cable runs from your building back to the incumbent telephone company’s central office. The ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier), as it is called, owns the copper in the ground. Once it gets to the CO, it can be connected to any number of competitive service providers.

Your selected bonded T1 service provider will have two T1 lines installed and run to their managed router, known as CPE or Customer Premises Equipment. It is here that the line bandwidth is combined. You have a single connection to the CPE that runs at 2x a single T1 line speed. How about the cost? It will be twice the cost of a single T1 line. There’s no real economy of scale with this approach. However, how much you pay for your T1 lines will depend on where you get them. This is where a bandwidth broker with access to a dozen or more carriers can get you the best pricing.

One nice feature of T1 lines is that they are almost universally available. You can get T1 and usually bonded T1 in the city, the suburbs or out in the countryside. Bonding T1 lines can be a lifesaver when there is no fiber for miles around. How much line speed can you get with line bonding? Double bonding for 3 Mbps is common. So is triple bonding for 4.5 Mbps and quad bonding for 6 Mbps. The practical limit to this process is somewhere around 10 or 12 Mbps, although in rare cases higher bandwidth have been achieved.

The other technology, Ethernet over Copper, offers a wider speed range and lower costs. The catch is that it is fairly new and not as widely available and trades distance for speed. Close to the CO, you can pretty much name your bandwidth between 2 and 45 Mbps. Miles away, you’ll have more limited choices.

EoC works somewhat similar to bonded T1 in that multiple twisted pair copper wires are used to transport the signals between the CO and your location. In fact, it uses the same telco wiring bundle that would otherwise be provisioned for T1 lines. Up to 8 copper pair can be bonded to create speeds of 10, 20, 30, or even 45 Mbps. Like T1, there is an upper limit to Ethernet over Copper, but EoC just starts picking up steam where bonded T1 tops out. In rare cases, EoC service at 100 and even 200 Mbps has been installed, but you almost need to be touching the central office for this to work.

How does EoC pricing compare with T1 and other traditional telecom services? You can generally get 2 or 3 Mbps EoC for the same price as 1.5 Mbps T1. If you want to go faster, 10 Mbps EoC can be had for about 3 times the price. Higher bandwidths can be had at a discount to what you pay for T3 lines on a per Mbps basis.

What if you need even more speed to run your business? This is the point where Ethernet over Fiber is the way to go if you can get it. EoF, as it is called, is a bargain compared to SONET fiber optic services. The available speeds range from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps, with many increments in-between. Two particularly popular speeds are 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet or GigE. You’ll note that these speeds mirror the standard LAN speeds of 100 and 1000 Mbps.

Are you poking along at 1.5 Mbps but wishing you had more line speed? If so, check out Bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper bandwidth services and prices for your business location.

EoC Takes On Fractional DS3

Before Carrier Ethernet became widely available, you had two logical migration paths from T1 to gain more bandwidth. You could take the big step up to T3 or DS3 service or bond T1 lines for a more incremental approach. EoC or Ethernet over Copper gives you a new and very attractive dedicated bandwidth option.

T1 lines have become popular because they are so readily available and have offered the right bandwidth for smaller companies and specialized uses by larger companies. A T1 line is rated at 1.5 Mbps in both the upload and download directions.

The other line service in the same T-Carrier family is T3 rated at 45 Mbps in both the up and down directions. At one time T3 was delivered over microwave and coaxial cable or waveguide, but that is rare to find now. Instead, the digital service the T3 delivers, DS3, is widely available over SONET fiber optic service. It is transported over a standard SONET service, OC-3, which can carry three DS3 services multiplexed onto the OC-3 fiber. DS3 is then demultiplexed and dropped off at the demarcation point through a standard DS3 interface. That interface is two small diameter coaxial copper cables with BNC connectors.

This works for a lot of companies. If you happen to be in a metropolitan area where metro fiber is readily available, it’s not hard to get provisioned for DS3 service. If you can make good use of 45 Mbps bandwidth and can afford it, DS3 is a fast and reliable telecom service. The question is what to do if you don’t need 45 Mbps, the budget isn’t there, but 1.5 Mbps is really cramping your style.

There are a couple of traditional approaches that can help you out here. One is to move up incrementally from T1 service. The other is to order a fractional DS3 service. It’s DS3 that’s throttled back do deliver less bandwidth at a lower cost.

You may be wondering how you scale up from T1 since DS3 is the next step up in the digital hierarchy. The answer is to combine the bandwidth of multiple T1 lines in a bonding process. You can order a second T1 line and have it bonded to the one you have to get 3 Mbps instead of 1.5 Mbps. Later on, you can add more lines and gradually work your way up to 10 or 12 Mbps. That’s pretty much the practical limit of T1 line bonding.

There are a couple of advantages to this approach. First, you don’t have to make a big bandwidth or cost commitment because you are moving up incrementally. This is the way a lot of businesses grow so it’s a good match. Second, your T1 service is provisioned over twisted pair telco wiring that’s likely already in place for multi-line telephone service. The added T1 lines use vacant pairs in the binder group, the bundle of wires that runs from your location back to the telco central office.

Why is that important? Because it eliminates big construction costs which you may not be able to avoid if you have new fiber optic service installed. If no DS3 is available, you may be stuck with copper or forced to pay a large construction bill. Even if DS3 is an option, fractional DS3 service may not save you that much money over a full DS3 service. The cost savings is not proportional to the bandwidth reduction.

Is there a good solution for this dilemma? Oh, yes. There is now. It’s a fairly new service called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Like T1, EoC is provisioned over twisted pair telco wiring that is already installed. Like fractional DS3, you can get bandwidths far above what T1 lines offer. Unlike either bonded T1 or DS3 and fractional DS3, EoC has a very attractive per-Mbps pricing.

2x2 Mbps and 3x3 Mbps are very popular Ethernet over Copper services for smaller businesses. The 2x2 means 2 Mbps upload and 2 Mbps download. It’s also called 2 Mbps EoC. The 3 Mbps bandwidth level works similarly. What you might not know is that you can get 2 or 3 Mbps EoC for the same price as a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. Exactly how much you can get for T1 price levels depends on how competitive the carriers are in your location. Either way, it’s more bandwidth for the same money.

The other interesting feature of Ethernet over Copper is that you can easily get 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 and perhaps even 45 Mbps delivered over copper and not fiber. Pricing per Mbps beats T1 and DS3 and can be as little as half the monthly cost. The limiting factor is distance from the CO. Ethernet over Copper technology is distance limited and not readily available more than a mile or two from the central office. Still, that covers a majority of business locations nationwide.

Are you stymied by the lack of bandwidth options or the costs involved in trying to connect via T1 or DS3? If so, check out Ethernet over Copper prices and availability for your particular business locations. You may be surprised by how much you can get for your bandwidth dollar.

Covad and ADTRAN Make Everything Ethernet

The age of Carrier Ethernet is upon us. All the excitement these days is directed at IP core networks and Ethernet access solutions. So, does that mean that legacy TDM services must be abandoned in place? Not at all. With the right equipment, DS1 and DS3 circuits can be repurposed for Ethernet transport. Carrier Covad and equipment maker ADTRAN are doing just that.

Covad is now deploying ADTRAN central office and network termination equipment to expand their Ethernet service area. Covad currently serves 44 states and 235 major markets with a core network that spans the nation. Their specialties have included business DSL, data T1, high bandwidth fixed wireless, bonded T1, and integrated voice and data with SIP, PRI and analog handoff. All of these are designed to serve the small and medium size business market. Ethernet is a natural addition to the Covad portfolio.

What’s special about the ADTRAN Carrier Ethernet solutions? It’s that they can pretty much press any existing line service into transporting Ethernet from the service provider to the end user. A service aggregation unit is installed at the central office to connect with the carrier’s Metro Ethernet and IP Core networks. For Covad, this is the Total Access 5000 MSAP (Multi-Service Access Platform). The aggregation unit brings in GigE or 10 GigE carrier bandwidth connections and apportions it to subscribers.

What makes this system so flexible is that the transport from CO to subscriber can be any of the common circuits already in place. These include DS3 and bonded DS3 bandwidth, T1 and bonded T1 lines, e.SHDSL bonded pairs. DS3 and T1 (DS1) are legacy service that are been used by many businesses for years. Ethernet over TDM or EoTDM allows service provider to keep those circuits in place and use them to provide Metro Ethernet or Carrier Ethernet services over an extensive area.

EoC or Ethernet over Copper has become very popular recently because it offers higher bandwidths and lower prices than traditional digital line services. The e.SHDSL technology can boost speed to 5.7 Mbps per e.SHDSL loop compared to 1.5 Mbps for T1. However, this is a distance limited technology that is typically extends no further than 9 km from the carrier’s point of presence.

An appropriate network termination unit is installed at the customer location. The companion product is the NetVanta 800 Series. These are configured for 2, 4, or 8 bonded e.SHDSL pairs, up to 3 bonded DS3 circuits for a maximum of 134 Mbps, or 2, 4 or 8 four-wire T1/E1 loops. In many cases, bonding multiple copper pair can bring in the bandwidth needed by businesses without the high cost of pulling-in fiber optic cable for a new installation. In many cases, fiber isn’t available nearby and isn’t really an option. Even so, 10 or 12 Mbps and up to 45 Mbps over existing copper wiring offers the requisite bandwidth at very reasonable costs.

Is your business straining at the limit of your current T1 line or dissatisfied with business DSL service? If so, you may find that Ethernet service from Covad and other top carriers is just what you need. Why not find out how much bandwidth you can get for your telecom dollar? It takes just a second to inquire and a knowledgeable consultant will be in contact quickly with prices and install times. Inquire about Carrier Ethernet for your business now.

High Bandwidth Dissimilar Line Bonding From Mushroom Networks

How would you like to build your own fiber optic bandwidth broadband service without paying through the nose for SONET OC3 or higher level service? Can you do it by kludging together whatever you can find in the way of DSL, Cable broadband, T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth, or wireless Internet service? Not very well, and you know it. But what if there was an appliance available where you simply plug-in five or six of your favorite high speed connections of any type and it smoothly merges them into one screaming high bandwidth service?

"Impossible," you say. "We tried that with our routers and it didn't work at all."

Well, what you need is not another router. You need the new and improved Truffles from Mushroom Networks.

Last year, we thought the Truffle BBNA6401 was just the nuts (or fungi) for both WAN reliability and bandwidth expansion up to 50 Mbps. The "BBNA" stands for Broadband Bonding Networking Appliance. It could also mean Broad Band Network Aggregation, which is how the device works. It bonds broadband services to aggregate or combine their bandwidth into the equivalent of one faster line.

T1 line bonding is commonly available from competitive carriers. For every line to bond-in, you get an additional 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth. There are a couple of restrictions. It's usually only practical up to 10 or 12 Mbps and all the lines have to be identical and from a single supplier. The carrier supplies you with premises equipment that is similar to the equipment at their central office. That's what runs all those T1 lines in parallel so that you experience the equivalent of a single higher bandwidth line service.

The Truffle looks at that approach as keeping companies in the dark and feeding them fertilizer. Instead, they manage the bandwidth of the lines rather than the lines themselves. By keeping track of what requests go out which lines and what responses are received, the Truffle can mix and match any broadband service into a common bandwidth pool. It doesn't really matter what the characteristics of individual lines are. A DSL and T1 line can be paired, then aggregated with a cable modem signal, a satellite receiver and a wireless cellular aircard. Your composite bandwidth is the sum of the speed that each line transmits and receives.

You can see the advantage of this approach for growing bandwidth incrementally. You start with whatever you can get. Then add services as they become available or you can afford them. In addition to speeding up your WAN connection, you also get a boost in reliability. That DSL line may be moderately fast but flaky. The cable modem is cheap and screams with speed, but drops the connection a couple of times a day and some days goes down for hours. T1 lines are rock solid but the cost per Mbps is way more than with the shared "consumer" grade services. DS3 is fast and reliable but lease prices are in the 4 digits per month. Since it is unlikely that you'll lose every service at the same time, broadband bonding can give you solid connectivity all the time with high bandwidth most of the time.

In addition to the latest speed upgrade, Mushroom Networks now offers several flavors of Truffles for various size businesses and applications. The Porcini BBNA is intended for SMB and enterprise clients, apartments, hotels, hospitals and multi-tenant buildings that want to aggregate several types of Internet connection into one high reliability broadband service. The PortaBella BBNA is for portable or mobile applications. It aggregates the bandwidth of up to 5 USB wireless modem aircards. There's even an optional service offered that makes this solution suitable for high quality video streaming.

Can Copper Really Replace Fiber?

Telecommunications technology advancement has been steadily upward toward higher and higher bandwidths. Twisted pair copper has been the mainstay of telecom services since the telephone was invented. Copper pair connections are still the standard for both analog telephone lines and T1 digital lines, including ISDN PRI trunks for PBX phone systems. Copper is so entrenched in telecommunications infrastructure that services over twisted pair wiring are available nearly everywhere. Unfortunately, higher bandwidths require fiber optic cabling and fiber optic infrastructure is not nearly as well deployed. It's a shame that copper is so bandwidth limited. Or is it?

Can copper pair wiring really substitute for fiber optic transport at bandwidths above 1.5 Mbps or telephone trunks of more than 24 lines? It can indeed and is available to do so right now. Even corporate LANs based on fiber optic wiring may find that copper WAN connections make perfect sense.

So how is it possible that twisted copper pair can equal fiber optic performance? It seems so counter intuitive. The answer is bonding techniques and new modulation technology. There are also a couple of caveats. At this point, copper bandwidths are most practical up to about 12 Mbps for bonded pairs and 45 Mbps for EoC or Ethernet over Copper. EoC also has distance limitations. But even so, a majority of business needs can be currently served by copper technology that is readily available.

T1 bonded pairs offer a way to multiple T1 line bandwidth from 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps, 4.5 Mbps, 6 Mbps and up to 12 Mbps. The bandwidth goes up in 1.5 Mbps increments. Line cost is also incremental steps of T1 line pricing. For ISDN PRI telephone trunking each T1 phone line is independent and supports 23 outside lines plus data and switching. You simply add another T1 line to get an additional 23 phone lines. For data transmission, T1 lines bandwidth is bonded together to create a single larger conduit. With pair bonding, the multiple T1 lines act as a single higher capacity line.

Pair bonding is also part of the technology used to implement Ethernet over Copper. In this case the modulation technique is different from that specified for T1 lines, but the results are similar. MIMO or Multiple Input Multiple Output interference canceling techniques improve performance for multiple pair in the same binder.

Ethernet over Copper provides Metro Ethernet transmission up to several miles from the carrier's POP or Point of Presence. The improved modulation technology supports bandwidths up to 45 Mbps, a level comparable to DS3 delivered on fiber optic cable. Many medium and larger businesses, plus smaller businesses focused on high bandwidth services such as video production, are migrating to DS3 levels to get the performance they need. EoC now makes that possible without the construction costs required for new fiber optic installation.

Can copper replace fiber? In the long run, probably not. Eventually fiber will be installed routinely in all new construction and increasing bandwidth demands will justify retrofits in buildings not currently served. But for the near term, multiple ISDN PRI, bonded T1 data lines, and Ethernet over Copper make copper pair transmission a very cost effective solution to higher bandwidth requirements.