T1 is Your Rural Broadband Solution

By: John Shepler

While metro areas enjoy a plethora of broadband Internet services, those outside the city limits or living on farms or ranches have little to pick from. Often all that seems available is smartphone 4G and two-way satellite. But, wait! There’s another option you may not be aware of that could be perfect for your rural business, farmstead or work from home. It’s T1 dedicated Internet access.

T1 is Everywhere
T1 line service is available just about anywhere you can get ordinary POTS analog phone service. That’s because T1 runs on standard telephone company twisted pair copper wiring. The same cable that brings in telephone service probably has a couple of unused pairs available for a T1 line.

T1 is a digital service designed by Bell Labs with regenerators to boost the signal. You can get service even if you are miles out in the countryside.

No Data Caps
The biggest limitation for wireless services, like 4G and satellite, is that the airwaves have only so much capacity to serve all their customers. This is why providers enforce data caps. Such caps used to be laughably low, but now are typically 5, 10 or 15 GB per month. That’s probably enough for a single user of email and web browsing. Your quota gets used up quickly with high def video, software downloads, cloud applications and data backups.

What happens when you hit the cap limit? It varies among providers. The cellular companies will charge you overages on a per GB basis. Satellite providers will either throttle down your bandwidth or cut you off until you buy more capacity.

T1 lines have no data caps. The line runs at a constant speed all the time. You can choose to load it up 24/7 and get as many bytes through the pipe per month as you can at 1.5 Mbps, or just use it as-needed during business hours. The full capacity is always there available for your use.

Dedicated, Not Shared
Another reason that some services have data caps is that the bandwidth is shared, not dedicated. T1 lines are also known as dedicated Internet access or DIA. The dedicated part means that the line is for your use exclusively. There are no other users.

That may sound obvious, but it’s not what you have with satellite, 3G & 4G wireless, or even cable and DSL. All of these are shared bandwidth services. They are typically priced lower than equivalent telecom wireline services because the bandwidth at any given time is divvied up among the users who are online. If you are the only one, you get the full capacity of the system. Usually, you are sharing the available capacity with dozens, hundreds or thousands of other users. This is why these services advertise their bandwidth as “up to” so many Mbps.

T1 lines are a fixed dedicated bandwidth. It’s not “up to 1.5 Mbps”. It’s 1.5 Mbps all the time.

Minimal Latency
Shared bandwidth services that get congested with too much traffic and all geosynchronous satellite channels have a particular issue called latency. Latency is a time delay between when a packet is sent and when it is received. If you are only dealing with 10 mSec or or so of line latency you’ll probably never notice it. However, when that latency rises to 100, 200, or even 500 mSec you’ll really notice it.

Satellite links have the highest latency simply because even light takes a millisecond to travel each 186 miles. That’s the familiar physics constant of 186,000 miles per second. When the signal has to travel 23,000 miles up to the satellite and another 23,000 back down you’ve lost about a quarter of a second. TCP/IP needs to be acknowledged, which doubles this latency. Add a little for ground and satellite equipment processing and you’re easily at 500 mSec or half a second best case.

Now you know why television reporters have to pause before the anchor can ask a question and vice-versa. You’ll have the same effect using VoIP telephony on a geosynchronous satellite link. Plan on treating your phone conversations like you were using a walkie-talkie or other two-way radio. Only one person at a time can talk or you’ll be talking over each other.

T1 lines have minimal latency. It’s pretty much determined by the length of the connection plus a little added for equipment processing. We’re talking tens and not hundreds of milliseconds. That works perfectly for VoIP or ISDN phone trunks, two-way video conferences, and just about anything you want to do on the Web, including working remotely or using cloud hosted applications.

Symmetrical Bandwidth
Shared bandwidth services are typically asymmetric. That means they have much higher download than upload speeds. Usually a factor of x10. That works fine for accessing websites or downloading files or video. It’s not so great for uploading files or backing up data to remote sites.

T1 lines are symmetric. They have 1.5 Mbps download and an equal 1.5 Mbps upload speed.

VPN Compatible
Some services, especially satellite broadband, don’t work well with the VPN or virtual private networks used by remote workers to connect to their employers. Satellite companies may even warn you that their service doesn’t play well with VPN because of the signal processing in their system. T1 has no such limitations. It’s a good match for VPN applications.

Highly Reliable
T1 lines were developed by the telephone companies for their own use in transporting bundles of phone calls. The technology is robust and well-proven. Outages are rare. If someone cuts the cable or a piece of network equipment fails, T1 lines get fast attention and quick repair. Often you can get a SLA or Service Level Agreement that spells out the mean time to repair as well as other characteristics such as latency, jitter and packet loss.

Broadband Options
While 1.5 Mbps may be as much as many users need for small business operations or working remotely, its not high bandwidth compared to many other services. One option is to bond two or more T1 lines together to get double, triple or even higher speed. Another option is to use a related technology called Ethernet over Copper (EoC). This service has similar characteristic to T1 but much higher bandwidth available. Unlike T1, EoC isn’t available everywhere and speed decreases with distance from the originating office.

Reasonable Costs
The final factor is cost. You can expect to pay more for dedicated T1 line service than you will for the consumer and other shared bandwidth services. There used to be a huge difference is price, but T1 costs have come down dramatically in recent years while other services have chosen to increase bandwidth and raise prices accordingly. If you have a serious need for connectivity and are frustrated by the lack of options or lack of performance in the options you do have, then you should give T1 a serious look. It might be a very good match with your needs.

EoDS1 Extends Ethernet over Copper Distance

Demand for Ethernet over Copper has outstripped its availability. Some of this is because
EoC termination equipment is not available yet in all central offices. More is caused by simple distance limitations. What can be done to make Carrier Ethernet available to all the businesses that want it?

MegaPath, a major competitive carrier, has an answer. It’s called EoDS1 or Ethernet over DS1. Now, just what is EoDS1 and how does it differ from EoC?

Both EoC and EoDS1 are copper wireline services. Both are provisioned over ordinary twisted pair telco wiring. This is the same copper bundle that brings in multi-line telephone service. Both use multiple bonded pairs to increase bandwidth. However, one has distance limitations and the other doesn’t. Why is that?

It has to do with the technology that sends the digital signals down the line. Ethernet over Copper is seen as a big improvement over T1 lines because bandwidth options go far beyond the 1.5 Mbps that T1 offers. Typical entry level for EoC is 3 Mbps. Many companies are opting for 10 Mbps now. High bandwidth users can get 20, 30, 45, 60 and even 100 Mbps using the copper plant that is already installed to their business. Prior to Ethernet over Copper, companies that needed higher bandwidths had to bring in fiber or do without.

Ethernet over Copper has changed all that for many businesses, especially those in dense metropolitan areas where central offices are plentiful and nearby. The technical issue is that high speed digital signals degrade rapidly with distance. You can only send data so fast on a twisted pair of small diameter copper wires buried in the ground. EoC gets around this to some extent by using multiple pairs to divvy up the datastream so that each pair can run at a slower speed. When added together at the far end, you can get a lot of bandwidth out of 4 or 8 pairs. Even so, the closer you are to the central office that terminates the wiring from your location, the more bandwidth options will be available.

So why does EoDS1 not suffer from these same limitations? Remember the venerable T1 line running along at 1.5 Mbps? DS1 or Digital Signal level 1 is the definition of the way the data is formatted on a T1 line. Sometimes the terms DS1 and T1 are used interchangeably.

You know that T1 lines and their DS1 signals can be connected miles from the central office. In fact, there aren’t very many locations even out in the boonies that don’t qualify for T1 line service. Until recently, it was the preferred backhaul connectivity for cell phone towers. It’s not just the lower line speed that makes this possible. T1 was developed by the telephone companies to interconnect their own switching centers. These can be long distances apart, so a signal regenerator was designed to boost the T1 signal every 6,000 feet or so. Multiple regenerators can be used on one line, greatly extending the transmission distance.

Here’s something else you should know about T1 lines. They can be pair-bonded, just like EoC, to increase the delivered bandwidth. Bond two T1 lines together and you get a 3 Mbps service. Bond 8 T1 lines to get 12 Mbps, pretty much the maximum speed available using multiple T1 lines.

As you might suspect, EoDS1 is nothing more than Ethernet over T1 lines. In many cases, you can order bonded T1 or EoDS1 and get the same bandwidth result. So why not just stick with T1?

The reason is Ethernet services. Your local area networks run the Ethernet protocol. You can interconnect LANs at multiple locations with T1 lines by going through protocol conversions to and from Ethernet. If you keep everything in the Ethernet protocol, the transmission process is more efficient and you have the option to link your LANs at the layer 2 level. This means that ordinary Ethernet switches can be used to route traffic on what is essentially one large Ethernet network.

Are you considering new Carrier Ethernet service or wish to expand your multi-location links to include places where EoC isn’t available yet? If so, take a closer look at the cost and benefit of Ethernet over DS1 bandwidth service.

Fiber Is The New Wireline

In telecommunications the term “wireline” means a copper wire connection. That’s contrasted with “wireless” which means no wires at all. There’s also another delivery mechanism called “fiber optic” which isn’t really a wire, but it really isn’t no physical connection at all like wireless. It may be neither fish-nor-fowl, but it is the likely successor to our copper wired infrastructure.

Fiber optic cable is destined to be the replacement for copper wire cable for a couple of reasons. In fact, they’re more alike than different.

Copper wire cabling is a bundle of twisted pairs of thin copper wires, each coated with a plastic insulating covering. Each wire is a different color or combination of colors for easy identification. They’re twisted together in pairs to reduce the effects of electrical interference. One pair is capable of supporting one telephone service or a DSL Internet service. Two pair will carry a T1 digital phone line. A binder group is a collection of individual twisted pairs bound into a single cable. A small to medium size business may have a 25 pair cable installed to provide telephone service. Larger cables have multiple binder groups, each color coded, in one fat plastic coated bundle. All this copper cabling can be buried in the ground or run overhead on poles. It’s where we get the term “land line.”

Now let’s compare our copper landline with a fiber optic cable. Look inside one of these fiber optic cables and you’ll see that the smallest unit is a single strand of glass fiber consisting of a core and cladding. That’s roughly analogous to the copper wire and its insulation. A fiber cable is like a binder group in that there are many individual fibers, each with a color coded jacket for easy identification. Also like copper cabling, fiber cable can be buried in the ground or run overhead on poles. Each fiber serves the same purpose as an individual twisted pair of wires. The difference is that wires transmit electricity while fibers transmit light.

Now, here’s why fiber is going to be the new wireline technology. The limitation with copper is that it can only transmit digital signals so fast. T1 lines have become the standard for digital telephony and business broadband because they use the same twisted pair copper wiring that's used for legacy analog telephony. It takes two pair to make one T1 line, but most businesses have at least a couple of unused pair available on their incoming telco cabling. A T1 line transmits and receives at 1.5 Mbps. If you have additional copper pairs available, you can bring in additional T1 lines. A process called “binding” couples them so they act like one larger capacity service. Eight T1 lines or 16 copper pair bonded gives you a broadband service of 12 Mbps.

Newer modulation technology can bind those multiple copper pair for a faster service called EoC or Ethernet over Copper. EoC can deliver 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps or even 45 Mbps with one limitation. You have to be within a few miles of the nearest carrier facilities, called their POP or Point of Presence. T1 lines can stretch out into the countryside to reach nearly every business, albeit at lower bandwidths than EoC can provide where available.

That’s it. You may be able to get the equivalent of 10 Mbps standard Ethernet speed and even approach 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet in special circumstances using traditional twisted pair copper wireline facilities. But if you want to get really fast service, Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, you’ve got to have fiber optic cabling installed. In fact, each of those fiber strands can provide at least 10 Gbps versus 1.5 Mbps for a copper pair over long distances. That’s several orders of magnitude difference.

The ground is full of copper telecom cabling, as are utility poles. That’s because there was a century of copper build-out by the telephone companies while they enjoyed a monopoly business position. The telcos and competing companies have been filling the ground with fiber cabling in recent decades. But nearly all of that fiber is for long haul transmissions. You are almost certain to have copper telecom connections to your business, but probably don’t have fiber unless you are in a fairly new facility or are large enough to justify the cost of bringing it in.

That’s all changing. The cost of trenching fiber optic cable isn’t that much different from copper cable. For new installations, it makes sense to install fiber as well as copper. Eventually, it will be fiber only as nothing will connect to copper anymore. It’s going back and bringing in fiber to existing buildings that requires a new investment that providers have been reluctant to make, except where demand from the users in the business park or office building has justified the one time construction costs.

Even in residential areas, fiber is becoming the choice of homeowners who can get it. Many individuals are abandoning their traditional landlines as “old fashioned” compared to being able to communicate anywhere using their cell phones. But cellular networks choke on delivering high bandwidth services, such as video on demand or computer operating system updates. Consumers are finding they actually need a wireline service, but one that has the capacity for high bandwidth content delivery. Verizon’s FiOS is the pioneer in FTTH or Fiber To The Home. Where available it is very popular, even as copper wireline service is abandoned in favor of cellular phone service.

Is your business starved for bandwidth? Perhaps a fiber optic connection can give you all the bandwidth you can use at a cost lower than you might expect. Don’t assume it’s too costly or unavailable until you check prices and availability of fiber optic service for your location.

Triple Play Helps Wireline Fight Satellite

The consumer television service market is all but saturated. It used to be that TV service meant calling the guy with the suitcase full of vacuum tubes. Now service means programming delivery. Your choices are over-the-air, cable, satellite, telco (AT&T) and fiber optic (Verizon).

The recent shutdown of analog transmission was met with a yawn by all but a small group of consumers who made no effort to buy a converter or a new digital TV. Now they're scrambling to the electronics department to get a converter box, or on the phone with the cable company or one of the satellite companies, DirecTV or Dish Network, to get their TV working again.

Once this blows over, where will things stand? Right where they were before the conversion. There's so much programming that's not transmitted on the airwaves that most people opt for an alternate TV service. Satellite has the advantage of being available where cable doesn't run and over-the-air signals are weak. Cable has the advantage of giving you a solid signal in storms that knock out satellite signals. But cable has another trick up its sleeve. That's something called Triple Play.

What's triple play? It's a bundle of television, broadband and telephone service from a single provider. This is something unique to "wireline" services. Those are, as you might suspect, services that run a wire to your home or business. That wire might be a traditional twisted pair copper telephone wire that also carries broadband and TV, as AT&T's U-Verse service does. It may be a coaxial cable, the universal connectivity mechanism for cable TV companies. Or it might now be a fiber optic connection as provided by Verizon's FiOS.

What can wireline do that satellite can't? Both DirecTV and Dish Network have designed their systems to be one way transmissions from constellations of satellites hovering in geosynchronous orbits to small rooftop dishes. For broadcast television, even hundreds of channels, that's all you need. For pay-per-view movies, you need a phone line or Internet connection to connect back to the satellite company.

You can get broadband service by satellite, but not on the same dish you are using for TV. It's a different band of frequencies and requires a transmitter at the dish to make it two-way. You need to get satellite broadband from a different company.

Satellite is no good at all for telephone. The problem is a time delay, called latency, that's the result of the satellites being tens of thousands of miles above the Earth. The speed of light and delays through the equipment introduce a half-second or so delay between the time you say something and when the other party hears it. You have to treat satellite voice communications like using a walkie-talkie and wait before you speak.

Both the cable companies and the telephone companies realize that their circuits have the ability to give you the triple play option of TV, broadband and telephone. So they offer attractive bundles to get a competitive advantage over the satellite TV companies. How good are the deals? A quick way to find out is to check the Triple-Play offers available for your location. Then compare with what you spend for a combination of TV service, broadband Internet and local and long distance landline telephone service from separate providers to see if the offers will save you money.