Connectivity Expansion With Multiple T1 Lines

T1 lines have been excellent network connection options for decades. They still are if your bandwidth needs are modest. But what do you do when 1.5 Mbps just won’t cut it anymore? Is it time to say goodbye to your faithful T1 line?

Wait! Not so fast. Those T1 lines have a lot of untapped potential. It’s simply time for a technology upgrade.

That upgrade is called “bonding.” As the name implies, bonding is a process of combining the capacity of multiple T1 lines so that they act as one larger bandwidth service. This is typically done using a managed router. The carrier’s side of the router has interface cards for two or more separate T1 lines. You plug into a single connector that delivers the combined bandwidth of all those T1 lines.

What level of bandwidth is reasonable to expect? Dual bonded T1 gives you 2 x 1.5 Mbps or a total of 3 Mbps. Triple bonded T1 produces 4.5 Mbps. Quadruple bonded offers 6 Mbps. You can bond 5 T1 lines for 7.5 Mbps, 6 lines for 9 Mbps, 7 lines for 10.5 Mbps and 8 lines for 12 Mbps. Generically, this is designated as NxT1 where N is the number of T1 lines involved.

Not all of these options will be available in any particular area. Two factors determine how much bandwidth you can get with multiple T1 lines. First is the equipment available at the central office where your telephone wire bundle terminates. This bundle consists of many twisted pair, perhaps as many as 50 pair, all in a single cable. That cable runs underground or overhead on telephone poles to get from your building to the telco office. Multi-pair bundles are almost always installed to business locations because they very often need multiple line telephone service.

The equipment is important because there have to be connections at both ends of the copper cabling for the bundling to work. There is a managed T1 router with multiple line cards installed in the telecom closet in your building. There is a complementary piece of equipment in a rack at the central office to connect to the far end of those T1 lines.

Assuming that the carrier equipment is in place, the limiting factor in bonding multiple T1 lines is the availability and quality of the extra copper pairs in the bundle. Some cables may not have 8 unused pairs available. That’s especially true if the building supports multiple businesses, all using several phone lines or more. Other cables may have vacant pairs, but they have bridging connections or quality problems that don’t support reliable data transmissions. In some cases, adjacent pairs may have too much cross talk to both carry T1 signals without data corruption.

A final issue is cost. The price of T1 lines has come down dramatically over the years. If you haven’t checked pricing since you signed your contract and renewed it a couple of times, you may be shocked at how little it costs to maintain T1 service these days. Some companies find that they can easily upgrade to 2xT1 or 3xT1 and not pay any more in monthly least costs. Otherwise the cost of bonded T1 service is the single T1 line times the number of lines you want to connect. There’s no real economy of scale.

If you still need 10 or 12 Mbps but the cost of 7 or 8 T1 lines is too much for the budget, you aren’t out of luck. A competing technology called Ethernet over Copper (EoC) can typically give you twice the bandwidth for the same dollar. EoC uses the same copper pair you would otherwise use for T1 but can support higher bandwidths, perhaps 15 Mbps, 20 Mbps or more. Unlike T1, Ethernet over Copper is distance sensitive and only works well for locations near the CO.

Would you like to upgrade to higher bandwidth business connections without the expense or inavailability of fiber? Get pricing and bandwidth options for multiple T1 lines and competitive EoC options now.



Note: Photo of multipair cable courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

How Capital Starved Companies Upgrade Technology

Here’s a business dilemma. The economy is improving, albeit slowly, and you have both the opportunity to capture additional business and a need to fend off competitors who are eyeing your share of the market with hungry looks. Unfortunately, you’ve been in survival mode so long that there isn’t much capital left in the savings account. Bankers make funny faces when they look at your loan applications. Is there any hope you can get new technology on-board before things get really desperate?

Conventional financing methods may not be working so well these days, but technology has given us other options for upgrading our technical plant. Most interesting is the option to deal with capital limitations by avoiding capital investments completely. How can you do that? Rent instead of own. The technical term for this is hosted solutions.

When you think of hosting, the first thing that comes to mind is website hosting. This is a huge industry with so much competition that you can host a small site now for just a few dollars a month and get a reseller account so you can provide hosting for other businesses for around $25 a month. For small to medium size businesses, the economic advantage of running your own web servers has all but vaporized. Yet, it wasn’t that long ago that downloading the Apache software and running your own server made a lot of sense for even home based tech businesses.

Now let’s scale this idea up for larger businesses. You’re probably thinking that you absolutely have to support your in-house data center because those racks and racks full of servers have such a special configuration that you can’t possibly buy the same service from someone else.

Oh? Have you been watching what’s happening in the world of cloud computing? Sure, the largest installations are targeted to the very high end of the market. But that cutting edge technology is now a few years old. Cloud computing isn’t something all that esoteric anymore. Just like web servers matured from a unique and proprietary product over the course of a couple of decades, cloud computing is rapidly moving up the learning curve. More and more companies are offering cloud services on a competing basis.

This is great news for businesses of all sizes. It’s relatively easy to go out now and rent your Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) by the hour. Why do that? For one thing, there’s no need for a capital investment. You won’t own the equipment and you won’t have to maintain it. It won’t even be installed on your premises. For another, you have an instantly scalable, nearly unlimited set of resources at your command. No need to get capital requisitions to buy equipment in anticipation of a need six months down the road. You only need to request and pay for the capacity you need right now. That’s processing, storage and bandwidth. If and when you need more, add it incrementally. If demand slacks, scale down your cloud resources.

The same discussion applies to Software as a Service (SaaS). Use collaboration or CRM cloud services and pay by the seat by the month. You can add resources easily as you hire new employees. No need to have a lot of facilities on hand in anticipation.

Telecommunications now also fits the rent rather than buy model. Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP, telephone systems leave the telephone sets on your desks but move the switching system and its telco trunk lines to the cloud. You get a rich feature set and the ability to integrate mobile smartphones as well as traditional desk sets. No need to worry about maintenance and dealing with the telephone companies. The service provider takes care of that. Plus, you have no investment. Some plans even include new IP business phones as part of your monthly fee.

If it has anything to do with computing or communications, you now have the opportunity to avoid raising capital and simply pay as you go for the technology resources you need to conduct your business. Interested? See what’s available from Cloud Computing Carriers right now... before you write another capital plan.