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.

WAN Network Connections From Copper to Fiber

By: John Shepler

LAN, MAN and WAN speeds continue to rise as content demands more and more bandwidth. This is increasing pressure on both copper and fiber based telecommunication networks for more frequent speed upgrades. Let’s take a look at what the options are for both traditional TDM (Time division Multiplexing) and IP (Internet Protocol) networks.

The Legacy of Copper Telecom Lines
Copper has been the mainstay of electronic communications, starting with the telegraph and then the telephone networks. The telegraph, of course, is long gone. The telephone is undergoing a technology shift where voice is becoming a converged network service. With the implementation of 4G LTE wireless, even cellular phone will soon move away from voice only channels to integration with data.

Clearly, analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is in its twilight years. What will remain for decades to come is its installed base of twisted pair copper lines that connect to nearly every building, commercial and residential. That copper still has value because it can transport digital signals as well as analog.

Digital T1 Lines
The oldest digital protocol for data transmission on twisted pair copper (not including telegraph) is still going strong. It’s the T1 line used for telephone trunking, point to point data, and dedicated Internet connections. T1’s history is that it was developed to transport multiple phone conversations digitally using existing telephone cabling. T1 can transport service over wide areas using signal regenerators to clean up the signal every 6,000 ft. You can get T1 nearly anywhere you can get landline phone service. The one limitation is its 1.5 Mbps bandwidth.

While 1.5 Mbps used to be considered broadband, it’s no longer adequate except for PBX telephony, casual Web access, email and point of sale credit card verification. This bandwidth is similar to 3G wireless. Wireless is rapidly moving to 4G wireless, with speeds an order of magnitude higher. Wired services are also moving to 10 or 15 Mbps as a minimal requirement.

Bonding T1 Lines & Ethernet over Copper
T1 is enjoying continued usefulness by bonding the bandwidth of multiple T1 lines to make one larger service level. This is practical up to 10 or 12 Mbps, but gets too expensive and hard to find available bundles of unused copper pair above that. What’s needed is a different technology that gets more bandwidth out of the same copper.

That technology is now available and called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Ethernet is a departure from T1 in the way the bits are organized on the line, but serves the same purpose. It uses exactly the same copper pair cabling with multiple pairs bonded to increase bandwidth. The differences are that EoC is available in increments from about 3 to 45 Mbps and it is distance limited. Near the central offices, high speeds are available. A few miles away there may be no EoC service at all. In between, there are different service levels possible.

There have been some major advances in transmission of data over copper pair wiring, with some installations supporting bandwidths as high as 100 or 200 Mbps. These are uncommon. Another copper technology, Cable broadband using coaxial copper cables and a modulation scheme called DOCSIS 3, can reliably deliver 100 Mbps or more bandwidth. Even 1 Gbps is not unheard of, although not that widely available. Another service called DS3 or T3 offers 45 Mbps over a pair of coaxial lines where available.

Fiber Optic Services for Unlimited Bandwidth
What really gets the job done at higher bandwidths is fiber optic cabling. Fiber bandwidth is nearly unlimited, especially when wavelengths are bonded to create very large services. Like, copper, fiber also has a legacy history and a newer technical approach.

Traditional fiber optic service is based on a telephony standard called SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork). Familiar service levels are OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps and OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps. Higher levels include 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps.

Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) is a Carrier Ethernet service like EoC, but using fiber rather than copper transmission. Fiber Ethernet is highly cost competitive and readily available from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Today’s most popular service levels are 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1,000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). In some areas, 100 Gbps service is available to businesses.

Wavelengths Options
Fiber enjoys another advantage over copper in that it supports multiple 10 Gbps wavelengths through a process called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. This means you can run different protocols on completely separate wavelengths within the same fiber strand. This provides a high degree of flexibility for financial institutions and others with demanding applications.

As you can see, there are a wide variety of options on both copper and fiber transmissionall currently available. What works best for your organization is a function of application requirements, scale and budget. You’ll likely have multiple technologies and multiple vendors to choose from.

100 Mbps Business Ethernet vs OC3 SONET Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Many high tech companies and large corporations got into fiber optic bandwidth service years ago. The service they chose was the one available: OC3 SONET. Since then, many have upgraded to higher speeds, also in the SONET family of service, or simply stuck with the OC3 that has been performing reliably over the years.

The entrance of 100 Mbps and higher Ethernet MAN and WAN bandwidth is challenging the dominance of SONET fiber service. Long time users are taking a closer look at the competition. Companies upgrading or ordering bandwidth the for first time are doing their homework before choosing one technology over the other.

SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) in the SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) became the core of most metropolitan, wide area and international networks over the last decades. It was originally developed as a massive telephone trunking technology designed to bundle hundreds and thousands of simultaneous phone calls for long distance transport. With the rise of computer to computer communications and the Internet, SONET services were the logical choice to carry data packets as well as voice channels.

What does SONET have going for it? It is a very mature and well supported technology understood by all of the telephone companies and most network carriers. It is highly reliable and can survive certain fiber cuts and equipment failures. There are a number of service levels available between 155 Mbps and 100 Gbps. Costs have also come down over the years to the point where even smaller companies can consider the entry level OC3 SONET service.

Why throw over a winning service for a newer technology like Carrier Ethernet? It comes down to cost, service features and scalability.

In case you haven’t noticed, just about everything that can communicate uses Ethernet. This includes nearly every corporate LAN, all PCs, printers, scanners, routers, network switches and wireless access points. That’s expanding now to telephones, televisions and any other equipment that is joining the “Internet of Things.” Why not an all-Ethernet world?

The brand of Ethernet that leaves your property is called Carrier Ethernet. It has been standardized by and industry group, the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), so that it works over long distances, has the operations and maintenance features needed for carrier operations and is compatible from provider to provider.

Let’s compare two very common bandwidth services: 100 Mbps Ethernet vs OC3 SONET. Both are provided over fiber optic strands and delivered to your organization at a specified demarcation point. For Ethernet you use a simple Ethernet copper or fiber patch cord to connect your equipment to the carrier’s demarc. OC3 requires a special interface module that plugs into a router to convert between the Ethernet on your LAN and the SONET that runs on the carrier lines.

This is one reason why SONET is losing ground to Ethernet. If your network and everything on it is running Ethernet, why do a protocol conversion from Ethernet to SONET and back again at the far end just to send Ethernet packets from point to point over to the Internet? There are inefficiencies associated with that conversion process. Plus, you need a specific interface module for each SONET level. An OC3 module won’t work for OC12 or OC48.

SONET has specific service levels, although you can sometimes get fractional or rate limited services below the maximum line speed. Ethernet is scalable by design. The carrier provides an Ethernet port with a maximum speed, typically 100, 1,000 or 10,000 Mbps. Your actual service level can be any speed up to the capacity of the port. You pretty much pay for the bandwidth you are actually using rather than the capability of the circuit.

Scalability can also save you money. A 100 Mbps or Fast Ethernet connection on a 1,000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet port can be scaled up or down easily. With SONET you start out at 155 Mbps for the entry level OC3. That sounds like 50% more bandwidth and it is. However, many companies really need 50 or 100 Mbps but had to buy 155 Mbps because it was that or nothing. If your 100 Mbps Ethernet connection bogs down, you can call the service provider and ask for an upgrade to 150 or 200 Mbps and have it in a matter of hours or days. If you tap out an OC3 connection, you have to wait days or weeks for an upgrade to the next generally available SONET level of OC12 at 622 Mbps.

Besides being able to order just the bandwidth you need now while knowing that you can easily upgrade when the need arises, Ethernet service tends to be less expensive than SONET on a per Mbps basis. But how about the quality of service? Both can deliver your packets with high reliability, low latency, and rock solid bandwidth. SONET tends to have fewer “flavors” available. It’s usually a protected ring arrangement with symmetrical dedicated bandwidth and five-nines (99.999%) reliability.

With business Ethernet, you need to be aware of what you are ordering. You can now get Carrier Ethernet with the same redundant path protection as SONET to ensure that if one circuit fails, the system will automatically switch to the other path in under 50 mSec. You can also get the same 99.999% reliability, low latency & jitter, and symmetrical dedicated bandwidth that you’ve come to expect with SONET services. However, if your applications aren’t so critical and you are more interested in saving money than in having the ultimate in performance, be aware that you can also order Ethernet services with asymmetrical bandwidth, shared bandwidth and unprotected circuits. These flavors of Ethernet work well for general Internet usage and casual PC backup to the cloud and are considerably cheaper.

Is SONET or Ethernet the best choice for your business bandwidth needs? Get free consulting help from a bandwidth expert who can also get you the best pricing from multiple carriers who offer services for your location. Also get instant online quotes for many bandwidth services up to 1 Gbps.

DS3 Bandwidth Alternatives

DS3 WAN connections are popular with companies needing more bandwidth than they can get from T1 lines but less than moving up to a full OC-3 fiber optic SONET service. So, why would you bee looking for other options? It generally comes down to either cost or performance. Most often, cost.

Yes, there are other bandwidth options available that can do the job that your current DS3 is doing. Let’s take a look at options available today that maybe didn’t exist when you signed your DS3 lease.

DS3 straddles the telecom border between copper wireline and fiber optic bandwidth services. It was originally part of the T-Carrier specifications developed by the Bell System for telephone trunking between switching centers. T-Carrier options include T1 and T3. DS3 is the service that rides on the T3 physical circuit.

Today the terms DS3 and T3 are used interchangeably. In practice, you’ll be hard pressed to find a T3 physical circuit. At one time they were available over microwave relay or waveguide pipes. The actual interface to your router is two coaxial cables with BNC connectors that plug into a DS3 interface module. Those cables have a distance limitation of 450 feet. So, how does DS3 service get from the Central Office (CO) to your location?

Most of the distance is covered by fiber optic cabling that doesn’t have this distance restriction. The DS3 signal is often multiplexed onto a higher bandwidth OC-3 SONET circuit. There may be other DS3 services sharing the same OC-3. Yours is dropped off at your building where it is converted to the industry standard coaxial connections.

This suggests a couple of alternatives to DS3. Before you jump into anything new, though, consider that you may not be getting the best price on your current DS3 service. Prices on telecom services in general have plunged in recent years owing to deregulation and considerable new competition. Perhaps the local telephone company was your only provider choice when you had the service installed. Now there may be several competing providers that are ready, willing and able to do the same job. Get multiple price quotes, preferable from a major bandwidth broker like Telarus, Inc., before you conclude that you need to dump your DS3 only for cost reasons.

Something else to consider is how much bandwidth you really need. Did you contract for DS3 because your T1 line was out of capacity? There’s a big gap between T1 at 1.5 Mbps and DS3 at 45 Mbps. Do you really need the full 45 Mbps or is that simply all that was available at the time?

If you really need, say, 10 Mbps, you can achieve it by scaling up from T1 or down from DS3. T1 lines are now readily bonded together to increase bandwidth. The practical limit is 10 or 12 Mbps without distance limitations. DS3 service can be rate limited to create what’s known as fractional DS3. In other words, you still have a DS3 interface installed but the actual line speed you pay for is 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, 30 Mbps or some other option.

Both these approaches may save you money compared to what you pay now. An even more attractive option is Ethernet. With Ethernet over Copper you can get bandwidths ranging from 3 Mbps on the low end up to 45 Mbps and sometimes higher on the high end. Prices per Mbps are generally lower, sometimes even half the cost, than the older T1 and T3 technologies. The hitch with Ethernet over Copper is that it is distance sensitive. The farther you are from the CO, the lower the line speed you can achieve.

Ethernet over Fiber picks up where Ethernet over Copper leaves off. Fiber optic Ethernet service is often available from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Popular options are 10 Mbps standard Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. The speed of the port installed at your facility sets the maximum, not minimum, speed you can achieve. Common practice is to install a 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps Ethernet port.

Fiber connections aren’t available for every building, but carriers have been so competitive in building out their networks that more locations that ever before are “lit” for fiber and others can be easily connected. Ethernet over FIber is easily scaled so that you can increase your bandwidth quickly by making a simple call to your provider. This means that you only need to order the bandwidth you need today along with a port speed capable of handling whatever speed you expect to need in the foreseeable future.

Ethernet over Fiber is a bargain compared to other telecom arrangements, if you can get it. If not, you might be able to get SONET fiber optic service to your premises. The lowest speed service is OC-3 at 155 Mbps, but in some cases this can be rate limited to provide fractional OC-3 service.

One final option is fixed wireless. This is unlike the lower speed 3G or 4G cellular wireless that is now available to business. Fixed wireless at 50 Mbps or more is a line of sight microwave service only available in major metro areas in the business districts. If your location qualifies, you can get fast and inexpensive installation compared to constructing a new fiber optic run.

So, how do you decide on the optimum solution for your company? Doing the research yourself can be time consuming and you may miss out on some opportunities that aren’t well advertised. Instead, run a quick online business bandwidth availability check for the options you want to consider and compare competitive pricing. You may be surprised by what has become available recently.


Note: Photo of BNC connector courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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.

So, What Does ISDN Stand For?

If you are involved with business telephone systems, you’ve no doubt heard the term ISDN bandied about. But what is ISDN and what can it do for your company?

As you might suspect, ISDN is an acronym. It stands for Integrated Serviced Digital Network.

I guess that’s not much help in and of itself. ISDN is a digital telephone standard that was originally intended to replace analog telephone lines for both residential and business users. It never really took off on the consumer side because DSL, Cable broadband and VoIP came along with higher bandwidths and lower prices. But ISDN did become a popular trunking service for PBX telephone systems. It also has a specialty niche application.

There are two ISDN standards you should know about. The low bandwidth version is called BRI or Basic Rate Interface. The higher bandwidth version is called PRI or Primary Rate Interface. They are constructed from the same elements. PRI just has more of them than BRI.

The two basic building blocks of ISDN are the B or bearer channel and D or delta channel. B channels have a bandwidth of 64 Kbps each. That’s exactly enough for one digitized telephone call or a low bandwidth digital modem. Remember 56 Kbps dial-up modems? ISDN BRI was supposed to replace them with one B channel for telephone service and a second B channel for modem service. The D channel is 16 Kbps and is used for signaling and control of the two bearer channels.

This arrangement of two bearer channels plus a delta channel is called 2B+D in telephony lingo. You have the option to use both bearer channels for telephone service so that you’ll have two digital phone lines. Or both bearer channels can be assigned to modem data with a bandwidth of 128 Kbps. That was considered fast when ISDN BRI was introduced, but quickly became obsolete with the introduction of broadband Internet service.

While ISDN BRI flopped as a digital home telephone service, it has found a new lease on life with radio stations and audio production. Standard analog telephone lines don’t have the bandwidth to reproduce natural sounding voices. But ISDN lines with the right CODECs (Coders/Decoders) can transport studio quality microphone signals from sports venues and other remote locations. They are also used extensively by voiceover artists and for high fidelity call-in interviews on-air.

ISDN PRI has the same B and D channels that make up BRI service. Only PRI is configured as 23B+D. That’s 23 bearer channels and one delta channel. The delta channel is still used for signaling and call control. Each B channel can support one telephone conversation. So, if you order ISDN PRI service for your PBX telephone system you can have up to 23 outside lines. They can be individually configured as incoming, outgoing, local, long distance, toll free or some combination of these.

Most PBX phone systems come with at least one ISDN PRI interface standard. Some have multiple ISDN ports so that you can add more phone lines if you exceed the capacity of 23 lines on one ISDN PRI trunk. Larger companies and call centers can make good use of the extra ports. The D channel handles call switching much faster than a standard analog phone line and also provides Caller ID for all B channels.

Is ISDN the service that is right for your telephony needs? If you have more than a half-dozen outside lines, you might be able to save money by converting to ISDN PRI. Even if you already have PRI service, prices have plunged in recent years and you may be able to cut your monthly phone expenses significantly with a competitive service provider. Find out right now by checking ISDN PRI prices and availability for your business location.

Cheaper DS3 Connections

You need higher bandwidth for your business operations, but the cost of DS3 is killing you. If you are running out of capacity on your T1 line and looking to upgrade, you may wince at even the thought of a DS3 line lease. Well, relax. DS3 connections are cheaper than they've ever been. Even in these challenging economic times, you may well be able to afford the DS3 connection you need.

DS3 or Data Service level 3 is a standard digital telecommunications service first developed for telephone trunking applications. It is standardized as part of the T-Carrier system, and works seemlessly with SONET fiber optic carriers. DS3 is nominally a 45 Mbps line service. Once provisioned on coaxial copper cable, most DS3 connections now come in on fiber optic cables. A single DS3 uses only a fraction of the capability of the fiber, but it can be multiplexed with other DS3s and transported cross country with ease.

What does one use DS3 for? Larger companies will use a DS3 dedicated Internet connection to serve dozens or even hundreds of employees. Configured as a digital telephone trunk, a single DS3 connection will support up to 672 simultaneous telephone calls. Who makes that many? A large corporation or a major call center can easily make good use of DS3 telephone service.

How much does a DS3 connection cost? You'll see nominal quotes of $5,000 a month. But you may well pay half that, depending on your location and lease length. The more densely populated your business location, the more likely it is that DS3 service will be available and the more competitive the pricing among multiple providers. You can get a DS3 quote in less than a minute online for business addresses.

What if a fiber optic drop is not really cost effective for your location? There is another service available, called EoC or Ethernet over Copper that is becoming very popular in metropolitan areas. Bandwidth varies with distance from the carrier's POP or Point of Presence, but can range up to DS3 levels of 45 Mbps. Get a quote on Ethernet over Copper bandwidth. If available, this service is generally cheaper than DS3 on a Mbps basis.

Finally, if your business is out in the boonies where fiber has not dared to tread, there are still voice and data connections available to you. Bonded T1 lines can deliver 10 Mbps or more using multiple pair of ordinary telephone cable. Since you can select the number of lines to bond, you can control the cost of your service to match your needs and budget and upgrade as demand grows. Get a quote on bonded T1 service for your location and see how affordable it really is.