Dynamically Allocate T1 Service

T1 lines have been used for decades to carry both voice and data. It’s commonly assumed that you need to specify which you are going to transport prior to installing the line. If you want voice, a channelized T1 line or ISDN PRI configuration is ordered. Each of the 23 or 24 channels will handle one telephone conversation. On the other hand, if you want a point to point T1 data line or dedicated Internet access, then you order a clear channel T1 line so you can use the entire 1.5 Mbps as a single pipe.

Many companies have multiple T1 lines installed because they need both high volume telephone service and dedicated Internet access. They may also have T1s available as dedicated private lines to branch offices or other business locations. All of these lines are ordered and configured separately. Is there any possibility of combining functions?

Indeed, there is. Let’s consider the channelized T1 line. Each of the 24 channels is independent and can carry one digitized voice call or 64 Kbps of data. The line doesn’t know or care what those bits represent. At each end, you have to know which channels are voice and which are data. The voice calls are all separate, of course. The data channels can be combined into one larger stream.

Early implementations of combined voice and data or integrated T1 lines did exactly that. They set up a channelized T1 line so that some channels were used to support business telephone calls and some were used for broadband data. Let’s say we simply divide the line capacity in half. That way 12 channels are used for 12 business phone lines. The other 12 are used for dedicated Internet access. 12 channels times 64 Kbps per channel gives you 768 Kbps of broadband service.

Why go to this trouble? A considerable portion of the cost involved in provisioning a T1 line is the local loop. That’s the twisted pair copper wires that run from your building to the telephone company central office. From there they can go to a competitive service provider or the phone company can use them for its own services. If a competitor wants the line they have to pay the phone company a lease fee that is passed along to you as a loop charge. Every time you add a T1 line you add an additional loop charge. If you can get one T1 line to do two functions, you only pay that loop charge once.

Integrated T1 service works well for smaller businesses that don’t need more than 12 outside phone lines or high bandwidth Internet service. Many smaller retailers use the data capability for credit card verification and for inventory control and other back office functions with headquarters. That plus telephone service takes care of their needs.

One glaring inefficiency in using a T1 line this way is that allocations are fixed. Any of those phone channels not in use simply sit there idle. That seems like a waste, since that idle bandwidth could help speed up Internet traffic if it was available. This is why newer implementations of integrated T1 use a different technology. Instead of dealing with all those channels independently, they convert the phone calls to packets and merge them with the data packets from the computer network. The combined data stream fills the T1 capacity of 1.5 Mbps. There is no idle capacity. Everything that isn’t voice is used for data.

Of course, for this to work the latency and congestion sensitive voice packets must have priority over the less critical data packets. That’s exactly what is done using Class of Service tagging. Voice packets always get higher priority. Whatever capacity they don’t use is automatically available for broadband data. This process is called dynamic allocation of bandwidth.

If that sounds a lot like the way a SIP trunk works, it’s because that’s exactly the way it is organized. In fact, SIP trunking is the new Integrated T1. Small SIP trunks use T1 lines, but you can also get higher capacity trunks using bonded T1, Ethernet over Copper, DS3, OC-3 or Ethernet over Fiber. The line works the same way on all of these. It is only the bandwidth that is different.

Could your business benefit from the cost savings of using a single Integrated T1 or SIP Trunk to supply both telephone and broadband Internet service, while maintaining excellent voice quality? If so, get prices and availability of dynamic line services like SIP trunks and Integrated T1.

PRI over Cable Cost Savings

Many businesses use ISDN PRI trunking to provide phone service for their organizations. The original motivation to move from analog business lines to PRI was the cost savings that T1 technology offered. Now there is a newer and even better cost option called PRI over Cable.

Regardless of the delivery technology, ISDN PRI is a well-established standard for bundling up to 23 business telephone lines on a single digital cable. Why 23? It’s because T1 lines were designed to have 24 channels, each capable of transporting one high quality digitized telephone conversation. One channel is reserved for signaling and Caller ID, leaving 23 channels available for phone calls. Each channel is equivalent to one analog phone line. By bundling them, you can almost always save money over ordering 23 individual phone line.

What’s more, nearly all modern PBX telephone systems and many key telephone systems support the ISDN PRI standard. There is a PRI jack on the back of the system or a plug-in accessory card. Many larger business phone systems accommodate multiple PRI lines so you can have 46, 69, 92 or more outside phone lines if your company is large enough to need this many.

ISDN was designed around T1 lines, but there is no reason that more modern packet switched networks can’t also provide phone lines to meet the ISDN specification. It’s all a matter of hardware and firmware on circuit cards to get the signals formated properly.

Comcast, the largest cable operator in the US, is now offering PRI telephone trunking over their Hybrid Fiber Cable (HFC) system. If you are only familiar with Comcast as a provider of Cable TV service or broadband, you may be surprised to learn that Comcast is the third largest telephone company in the country. The other possible surprise is that Comcast is a business as well as residential service provider.

Coaxial cable has bandwidth capabilities far beyond those of twisted pair copper telephone wiring. This is especially true when most of the network is built on fiber optic cabling and only the last mile or less uses coax. Coax is cheap, reliable and well-proven technology. There is plenty of room on that coax to delivery television, broadband and telephone services, including ISDN PRI.

But isn’t broadband telephone fraught with performance issues? The Internet often isn’t up to traditional telephone standards when it comes to voice distortion and latency, the annoying time delay that makes you pause during two-way conversations. That’s why Comcast keeps their broadband and telephone signals separate. They’re both riding the same cable, but in different channels so they don’t interfere. TV signals are also on the same cable in their own assigned channels.

What makes PRI over Cable a great option for a small to medium size business? Consider that you can get a 6 channel telephone trunk capable of serving up to 24 employees plus 22/5 Mbps broadband Internet service for less than the cost of many T1 lines. Most companies need both telephone and Internet service, and Comcast’s business class Business Class Trunks and Internet with broadband speed up to 22 Mbps download easily fits the need.

Do you need a larger phone system capacity or are concerned that you will in the future? No problem. Comcast lets you add to your PRI service in single channel increments. Many ISDN PRI services now come with a full 23 lines even if you don’t need that many. Having a system that is scalable for both phone lines and Internet bandwidth gives you the ability to buy just what you need now and be able to easily upgrade in the future.

Could you benefit from the flexibility of business telephone service that will grow with your business or just want to see if you can save on ISDN PRI over Cable with or without bundled broadband service? If so, get pricing and installation times for ISDN PRI and bundled services for Comcast Business Class. There are also attractive voice and data plans from competitive carriers where cable services are not available.

Why Bandwidth is Cheap Downtown

Are you looking to expand your business bandwidth at bargain prices? Then go downtown. You'll find more competition and lower prices in the heart of the city than anywhere else. Well, if you can't afford to move there for the outstanding bandwidth pricing, I do have an alternative that's just as good for many companies.

The price of good real estate downtown is astronomical. Why should bandwidth be cheap? It's for the same reason that real estate is expensive: density.

Think of real estate as being a pie. There's only so much of it and the choice pieces command a premium. The more people that want to grab a slice, the higher the price goes.

Now consider bandwidth. The more people who want a slice of bandwidth, the cheaper it gets. That's because the high cost of business bandwidth lies in the capital expense (capex) that it takes to dig tranches, pull wires and fiber optic bundles, and install electronic racks to manage the signals at both ends. With fiber optic, especially, it costs little more to pull a hundred fibers at once as it does to install a single strand.

Once the capital investment has been made, the incremental cost of electronically transferring data from point to point or to the Internet is relatively small. With lots and lots of clients to amortize the buildout costs, providers can afford to offer reduced prices in areas of high business population density.

A related reason for better bandwidth prices downtown is competition. If you want to catch fish, you go where you know there are lots of fish. If you want to provide voice and data services to business, you go where the businesses are. That's not down the country lane where establishments are few and far between. It's downtown where they are literally stacked on top of each other. What once was the exclusive domain of the telephone companies is now home to dozens of competitive carriers, each hungry to expand their service footprint and client list. Competition leads to lower prices, as providers vie to capture the lion's share of the business.

A third factor is technology. There's a newer last mile delivery technology called Ethernet over Copper or EoC that can provide your business with up to 45 Mbps of Metro Ethernet connectivity at bargain rates. The hitch is that you need to be located within a few miles of a carrier point of presence to qualify. Such high bandwidth signals don't travel far over twisted pair copper wiring. But where they do, you'll get an excellent price per Mbps compared to other service options.

So, is your business located downtown? If so, find the best deals on business bandwidth services through a simple online query.

Are you farther out in the burbs or in a small town or rural location? One way you can also get excellent rates on bandwidth services is to colocate your equipment, not your entire business. A T1 line or bonded T1 lines will get you connected from you place of business to the colocation center. Install your servers in the center and you'll have easy access to multiple competitive carriers located in the same facility. Find the best deals on colocation bandwidth and decide for yourself if the cost savings justify a move to where the cheap bandwidth is.

Telephone and Internet for Chain Stores

Small businesses are highly cost sensitive. They can't afford to lose customers to credit card transactions that won't go through or telephone calls that get garbled and dropped. If your business is a franchise or simply has multiple locations, you also have a need to tie your operations together efficiently. What can do all this and still protect your budget? It's Integrated T1.

The integration designation of Integrated T1 service refers to a merging of voice and data, that's telephone and Internet, on a single T1 line. This is done for efficiency and cost minimization, while maintaining telecom quality.

T1 telephone service has long been the gold standard for "trunk lines" that bring in many telephone lines to a business location. T1 is a digital line service that replaces single analog phone lines. The line is segmented into 24 separate channels. Each is the equivalent of a single analog phone line. With a special configuration called T1 PRI, one channel is dedicated to signaling and data, including Caller ID.

T1 DIA or Dedicated Internet Access is the equivalent gold standard for business Internet service. Here the line is configured as a single broadband "pipe" rather than dividing it into channels. The capacity of a T1 line is 1.5 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. That's plenty of bandwidth for nearly all small businesses who need access to the Internet, data exchange with the main office, access to remotely located servers, and POS connections for inventory management and credit card authorizations.

A medium size business may very well order a T1 PRI telephone line with 23 local and/or long distance lines plus a T1 DIA line for Internet service. As the business grows, additional T1 lines can be connected to increase capacity as needed. But what if 23 phone lines are way more than you need? You want the SLA (Service Level Agreement) that guarantees performance of your voice and data lines. But is there any way to cut the cost since you don't really need all that capacity?

That's what Integrated T1 line service gives you. You can designate up to 12 channels for telephone service. Many smaller businesses, including real estate offices and retail stores, need only 6 to 12 anyway. The rest of the bandwidth is assigned to dedicated Internet access. That gives you a minimum of 750 Kbps to 1 Mbps of dependable broadband.

A popular variation of Integrated T1 service is called Dynamic T1. With this service any bandwidth not being used to serve telephone calls in progress is assigned to Internet bandwidth. This make more efficient use of your line so you can get the best voice quality for phone calls and the most bandwidth for Internet access.

If your small business location depends on both reliable high quality telephone service and solid reliable access to the Internet or VPN (Virtual Private Network) connections to your other business locations, the service you'll want to price and consider is Integrated T1.

Managed IP Networks Enable Voice and Data Convergence

Many companies have been eying their computer and telephone networks for opportunities to save money without losing services. A popular approach is to combine or converge those two networks into a single multi-functional LAN that can be extended to connect with the public Internet and telephone network. One network, one connection per desk, and one support team are the goal. Sadly, the reality can fall short of the dream.

What's the reason for this? The way computers traditionally use a network is quite different from how a telephone uses its network or a security camera uses its video network. Most of what we use computers for is to shuttle data from one place to another. The main requirement is that the data remains intact. What is received must be bit for bit identical to what is sent. It doesn't really matter if there are short delays in the transfer or if some parts of the data set need to be resent because they arrived corrupted. As long as data integrity remains intact and the transfer time doesn't impact productivity, the computer network is doing its job.

The telephone network is a different animal. Telephony is a real time process. You speak into one phone and your voice comes out of another. It's a continuous process in analog telephony, consisting of an varying electrical signal that is present for the duration of the call. Any delays, interruptions or added noise are noticeable and objectionable. They are perceived to be degradations of the service.

What convergence does is convert analog telephone signals into data packets that are compatible with an Ethernet computer network. The phone, in essence, becomes a computer. But to emulate a telephone network, any phone packets need special care and protection from being pushed out of the way by large data file transfers. A stream of telephone data representing a voice signal can't be retransmitted if it is corrupted. That would make two-way conversations even more confusing than a few glitches from missing packets. When voice is added to a data network, it needs to be treated as first among equals.

That's the challenge of network convergence. The techniques often adopted are to have enough bandwidth to accommodate voice, video and data simultaneously. In addition, real time signals such as telephone or video cameras are given priority over less time sensitive packets such as computer file transfers.

Now, consider the Internet. The Internet treats all packets the same and gives no priorities to voice, data or video. In addition, parameters such as latency (time delay), jitter (variations in time delay), packet loss and bandwidth have no guarantees. You get what you get and it may vary from second to second.

That's the impetus behind managed IP networks. A managed IP network is like having a private Internet. You use the same equipment, the same protocols, and connect to the same places. But the network you travel on is carefully managed to ensure quality for your critical packets. Where it connects to the actual Internet to give you access to this important public resource, there are protections so that you still have quality assurances for your telephone services that don't travel on the Internet.

If you've been disappointed by the results you are getting from company initiatives to move to enterprise VoIP telephone services or converged voice and data networks, then you may be pleasantly surprised by the results you can get with managed IP networks. Take a few minutes and find out what a managed IP network can do for you.