T1 Line Attributes

T1 lines have become the de facto standard for small to medium business connectivity. They’re used for dedicated Internet connections, point to point private lines, network access, and business telephone trunks. Let’s have a look at the attributes that make T1 lines so popular.

A T1 line consists of one or two twisted pair of copper telco wiring that runs between your business location and the telephone company central office (CO) where your line terminates. The incumbent local telephone company owns that run of copper, but that doesn’t mean that you have to buy your T1 service through the phone company. In fact, you’ll probably get a better deal from one of the many competitive T1 service providers who offer these lines.

How can that be? The phone company owns the copper, but they lease out unused pairs at attractive rates. It’s all part of the telecom deregulation process that’s taken place in recent decades. Competitive service providers who are capable of supplying T1 service then vie for your business and will lease the copper connections necessary to connect to your facility.

Note that I said T1 can be provisioned over one or two twisted copper pair. The original specification for this line service required two copper pair. One is used for transmit or upload. The other is for receive or download. There is a specified voltage, wave shape and pulse width defined for the line signals. The transmission rate is 1.5 Mbps over 6,000 ft. runs before the signal degrades too far to be usable. To go farther, electronic boxes called signal regenerators are placed at 6,000 ft. increments to restore the T1 signals to their original characteristics. Based on this technology, T1 lines can reach many miles into the countryside to connect just about any business location.

You may find that your T1 line comes in on just one pair of copper wires. That’s due to a newer modulation technology called HSDL2 that can transport both transmit and receive signals over the same wire pair up to about 12,000 ft. That’s sufficient to reach most business locations.

Your T1 service will be provided to you through an interface connection called a “smart jack.” This small electronics box connects to the incoming copper wire and gives you a port over an RJ-48C connector. This jack looks like a standard Ethernet RJ-45, but uses a keyed connector. You need a specialized cable that plugs into the RJ-48C and connects to your equipment on the other end. Your equipment will need a “T1” interface card or “ISDN PRI” interface card if you are using ISDN PRI telephone service. The T1 signal is unique and not directly compatible with Ethernet or other digital signals.

So much for the physical attributes of T1. Now let’s look at how T1 bit are organized. When used for telephone service, T1 lines are organized at 24 channels or time slots of 64 Kbps each. One channel can support one telephone call. When used for data transmission, the channel divisions are ignored in favor of a single 1.5 Mbps “pipe.” This pipe is symmetrical. You have the same 1.5 Mbps in both upload and download directions.

What about ISDN PRI? This is a special format of T1 telephone service that consists of 23 channels that can provide 23 separate business telephone lines. The 24th channel is used for switching signals and Caller ID / ANI information.

A further attribute of T1 lines is that they can be bonded together to create higher bandwidth lines. If 1.5 Mbps isn’t enough, you can get double bonded or 2xT1 service that combines 2 T1 lines for 3 Mbps. Yes, you can keep adding lines until you reach a practical limit at about 10 or 12 Mbps.

How about your business? Could you benefit from T1 line service or a better price on the T1 service your have now? If so, there are excellent deals available on T1 and bonded T1 line service right now. Get competitive quotes and see for yourself that T1 is more affordable now than ever before.

Why T1 Is Available Where Other Line Services Aren’t

If your businesses is located off the beaten path, you may have experienced the frustration of not being able to get the same network services offered to companies downtown. You might even have come to the conclusion that there’s really nothing available to you. Oh, but there one highly reliable and reasonably priced digital telecom service that you can get almost anywhere. What is it? It’s T1.

There are a couple of misconceptions about T1 that go back to when this was something of an exclusive service. They are that T1 lines are very expensive and only available in certain areas. Neither of those is true any longer. T1 lines are available for most every business location. T1 lines are also quite reasonably priced for businesses, although not competitive with or available as residential services.

The fact that you can get T1 and not some of the “bargain” services like DSL and Cable broadband may actually be to your advantage. Those lower cost services have lower prices not because of any special technology, but because they are shared rather than dedicated bandwidth and because they are offered as “information services” with no particular guarantees of availability. Your bandwidth can vary all over the place and if the line goes down, it will get fixed when it gets fixed. T1 lines come with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guarantees such things as bandwidth, jitter, latency and mean time to repair.

Why would anyone buy a low budget information service instead of a professional grade telecom service? In some cases, it’s because the person placing the order isn’t all that familiar with the differences between bandwidth services and goes for the lowest price option available. In other cases, it’s because the service is being used to power a free WiFi hotspot as a service to visiting customers or for casual Internet activities that aren’t all that critical to the daily operation of the business.

T1 is so universally available because it is a highly mature technology, originally developed by the phone companies to transport two dozen phone calls at a time between switching offices. As such, it was designed to use two pair of twisted copper wires as part of a multi-pair bundle installed into nearly every business. Some of the wires in the bundle are used for phone service essential to any business. Others can be used to provide T1 line service.

T1 was also engineered with optional regenerator boxes that could be installed every mile or so to clean up and boost the signal to extend its range. This way, T1 lines can be run far out into the countryside with the same performance as those in town. That’s not so for DSL and Cable, which are pretty much constrained within the city limits and not much further.

T1 is a highly versatile line service. You can use it for dedicated Internet access, multiple telephone line trunks or as a point to point dedicated private line. It’s possible to get T1 private lines that span the nation. In this case, the are multiplexed onto long haul fiber optic circuits for most of that distance and only delivered as copper at both ends of the run.

T1 lines give you 1.5 Mbps of rock-solid exclusive bandwidth in both the upload and download directions. You don’t have to contend with any other users when you want access to the line. Prices start at under $300 a month in many locations nationwide. In lesser populated areas, the prices will be higher due to the extra effort install all the needed equipment, including regenerators, to your location.

What if 1.5 Mbps isn’t enough? You have to option to bond multiple T1 lines together to get a single larger bandwidth service. If you double bond, that is use 2 T1 lines, your bandwidth will be 3 Mbps. The number of lines you can bond together varies with location, but 10 to 12 Mbps is a practical limit in most locations. That’s plenty for most business needs.

Now that you know that T1 lines are very likely available to you at reasonable cost, how about getting T1 line service pricing and options for your business location? It sure beats having to move just because you didn’t think you could get connected.