• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Isn't T1 obsolete?

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Originally posted by: kevnich2
Luckily around where I live, our cable broadband is VERY reliable. But of course, bright house came through and upgraded everything and basically put fiber to the curb. In the two or so years I've had my cable connection, it has gone down ONE time for about an hour. I wasn't home at the time but when I got home, I actually had a voice mail saying (automated message but still) that they had problems and that they apologized for any internet downtime). This is residential cable and obviously no SLA. I was impressed. Our T1 at work has gone down more than that.
Click to expand...

I'm in St. Petersburg, FL and I work for a small internet company. We only have about 15 employees working here in the office and we have a T1 and a 15mbps/2mbps cable connection which I also have at my residence. The T1 goes down more than the Brighthouse cable and no one in the office wants me to setup their pc on the T1 line due to crappy speeds.
 
Originally posted by: Muscles
Originally posted by: kevnich2
Luckily around where I live, our cable broadband is VERY reliable. But of course, bright house came through and upgraded everything and basically put fiber to the curb. In the two or so years I've had my cable connection, it has gone down ONE time for about an hour. I wasn't home at the time but when I got home, I actually had a voice mail saying (automated message but still) that they had problems and that they apologized for any internet downtime). This is residential cable and obviously no SLA. I was impressed. Our T1 at work has gone down more than that.
Click to expand...

I'm in St. Petersburg, FL and I work for a small internet company. We only have about 15 employees working here in the office and we have a T1 and a 15mbps/2mbps cable connection which I also have at my residence. The T1 goes down more than the Brighthouse cable and no one in the office wants me to setup their pc on the T1 line due to crappy speeds.
Click to expand...

Yep, sounds about right. We're just east of Brandon but we're not able to get cable here simply because it'll cost around 20k to have the fiber extended by the cable company. We'll end up having it done eventually but it's current not a need yet. I'm also looking for a place in our budget to put it to have it done.
 
Muscles, first, gather documentation. Use something like Nagios that gives you the pretty graphs as well as text logs to show all the times that your line is down. Next, call up your state's public utility commission and tell them that you have a T1 that is extremely unreliable and your carrier won't fix it. I must caveat this with saying that some of the CLEC T1s might not be regulated as T1s at all (they may be a UNE/dry loop from a regulatory perspective), but if you have a real ILEC T1 there are strict regulations about the reliability and the PUC can smack your LEC around if they aren't delivering that. This is one of the primary advantages of a T1 over other services like DSL, cable, and best-effort fiber -- T1s are a tariffed service and regulated heavily.

montypythizzle, SONET is a complex and wacky technology for delivering TDM services over fiber. It typically has a dual-ring topology and one of its big strengths is that properly designed and implemented SONET networks can "wrap-around" one cable or equipment fault in less than 10ms. Most telco TDM services are actually carried over SONET fiber, for example, if you're in a big office building, they run a fiber loop in, and there's a box in your basement that breaks out into the actual copper T1 and POTS lines. You can also do other wacky multiplexing, for example, you can combine 5 2Mb/s channels to make one 10Mb/s channel and emulate an Ethernet link, and there are similar tricks you can do to get 100Mb/s or gigabit. You can think of SONET as the traditional telco/TDM way of doing fiber. It's a good technology, but very expensive.

A LEC is a Local Exchange Carrier, which means the company providing you with the actual signalling layer of service (ISO L1). This term came about in the Telecom Act (of 96?) as a legally more formal definition of what we used to call the RBOC (Regional Bell Operating Company). But there were always a bunch of little non-Bell markets and the Telecom Act introduced the concept of the Competitive LEC (CLEC), so a new terminology was needed. The Incumbent LEC (ILEC) is the old guy, and the CLECs are the new guys. Generally speaking, the CLECs didn't overbuild last-mile access networks, so in practice the CLECs were critically dependent on the ILECs to deliver the physical cable plant connections so that the CLECs could offer services that compete with the ILECs. And somehow the politicians couldn't figure out how that was going to play out in practice.

DS3 is what you think is a T3. Depending on who you ask, there never was such a thing as a T3, or there was but they don't provision those anymore, or DS3 and T3 mean the same thing. If there was such a thing, it would be a telephony service as opposed to a data service, anyway. A similar issue surrounds DS1 and T1; what you buy today is generally a DS1 over HDSL2 or a DS1 directly out of a SONET ring. I don't think they do old-school four-wire T1s anymore.
 
Pardon me for jumping in with a newbish question but doesn't DS1/T1 provide a full 1.536Mbps of bandwidth? Versus if it was a consumer connection which would more likely only bring in 192Kbps of actual download "speed"?

In that sense I thought that a DS1/T1 would be as fast as a 12Mbps consumer line.
 
Inline...you're mixing Mega and Kilo, big B and little b.

T1 is 1.536 megabits/sec. Meaning it would be comparable to DSL at 1.5 megabits/sec.
 
Our local Cox Cable FINALLY reduced its rates for Business Cable Modem. They did it without announcing it to current customers. A couple of my clients are STILL paying $80 a month for 256K/256K Business connections (ultra-slow), when, for $100, they could have 6M/768K connections.

Under the new rates, I can get a 10M/2M Business connection for $200 a month. That's pretty nice compared to the cost of a T1 at 1.5M/1.5M. But, obviously, you lose out on a good SLA. My own 6M/768K connection ($100) has been great so far (six months), based on my ISA 2004's 24/7/365 Connection Verification Monitoring. But that's always subject to change.....
 
Muscles, first, gather documentation. Use something like Nagios that gives you the pretty graphs as well as text logs to show all the times that your line is down. Next, call up your state's public utility commission and tell them that you have a T1 that is extremely unreliable and your carrier won't fix it. I must caveat this with saying that some of the CLEC T1s might not be regulated as T1s at all (they may be a UNE/dry loop from a regulatory perspective), but if you have a real ILEC T1 there are strict regulations about the reliability and the PUC can smack your LEC around if they aren't delivering that. This is one of the primary advantages of a T1 over other services like DSL, cable, and best-effort fiber -- T1s are a tariffed service and regulated heavily.
Click to expand...
cmetz, does this apply to all states in the U.S.?
We use a VNO (Vanco) to manage our WAN circuits so obviously for any SLA issues it's between us.
Just wondering if we can proactively complain to the PUC about some of the circuits that just keep taking errors.
 
Cooky, every state is different. I would suggest that you first try calling your PUC and asking. At least in my state, they're friendly, helpful folks - they just have some things they can very effectively get fixed for you and some things that are completely out of their hands. They can at least tell you what the tariff rules are in your state and what ability they have to enforce them.

Also, in some states, the PUC is basically in the pocket of the utilities, in other states, the PUC is basically hostile to the utilities. In my state, I'd call them pretty balanced, maybe just a little over on the consumer's side rather than the utilities'. So in some states you're basically SOL, and in other states the PUC won't let little things like the law stop them from beating up the utilities on your behaf.
 
It's kinda late in the discussion, and some of the points have been covered, but a similar question came up on the CIsco board and this is the answer I posted FWIW:

A T1/DS1 (to the Internet) is not as expensive as you suggest. I've seen ads & promotions for as little as US$350.00, though typical is probably in the $500-600 dollar range.

For a straight-up T1/DS1 point-to-point connecting two point in the same general geographic area (like Metro Chicago), you can probably get it for $100-$300.

What you get for the money, in addition to the (usualy) reliability is a "Service Level Agreement" (SLA) that frequently guarantees 99.99% or more uptime, occasionally some monitoring (initiation of repair without the end-user having to call 24X7X365), and some flexibility on the service (HDLC, Frame-Relay, ATM, MPLS).

You can also bundle T1s for additional bandwidth using something like IMA or Multi-Link Frame Relay (MLFR) ... some folks even use MLPPP.

Huge bandwidth doesn't matter if it's not available, or is not reliable. When the business is on the line, "reliable" wins the vast majority of the time. It's just part of the cost of doing business.

Certainly there are "business class" DSL and cable services, complete with SLAs, and their use appears to be growing. Generally speaking, you can get a T1/DS1 to any location ... it's repeatable.

DSL, even with "Remote Terminals" still has some distance limitations, and may not be cabable of having multiple DSL signaling in a single cable bundle; i.e., even though you have at least four pair of conductors in a phone cable, putting four DSL lines on that cable may cause interference between the lines.

Cable broadband may be extendable to the extent that T1/DS1 is, but it's carried on fiber and coax .... which may or may not exist to, and near, the end-user's premises.

In nearly all cases, some copper (ala phone lines / T1-capable copper) is usually alreadey available to the premises.

Adding media to the site is usually an additional cost and would add to the overall cost of implementation.

I"m sure thre are some other considerations; overall, much will depend on where the site is located, distance to the CO, available media, how critical the circuit is to the business, etc.

Hope this helps

Good Luck

 
ScottMac et al., my experience is that the really cheap T1 circuits (esp. if we're talking T1 + Internet service) fall solidly in you-get-what-you-pay-for land. Typically they're really delivered by a CLEC over an ILEC dry loop, meaning from a regulatory perspective all you have is an UNE, and no regulatory recourses. The other thing I see a lot on the really cheap T1s is layers of resale, where each layer adds another layer of finger pointing and/or screwing up when there are problems. And there's always the issue of who the ISP is, and how good their network is. A T1 to Qwest is much better quality bandwidth than a T1 to Crazy Eddie's Video Store and ISP.

So basically, yes, T1s are much cheaper now than they were, but the really cheap ones aren't worth it.

I've found T1 reliability in general to be a bit overrated. Maybe it's just the volume of circuits I have to work with. I see some locations / ISP / LEC combinations that are just constant problems and keep breaking regularly, and the usual solution is to switch to a totally different technology or at least a different ISP and LEC. I also see a lot of random failures. There are a lot of pieces in the telco network to break. SmartJacks break a lot more often than the telco likes to admit. MUX line cards, too, and those also have a habit of going off into space where smacking them around with a few loop/unloop commands magically resets them to work again for a few months. And then there's the telco maintenance that they never tell you about, or when there are big fiber cuts and their supposedly redundant SONET network still goes all the way down and takes a bunch of carried Ts with it - at which point your T1 is low priority to restore.

I'm not knocking T1s in general, just observing that they're not as reliable in practice as some might claim. And that unfortunately impacts their value.

One of the big advantages to a T1 circuit that is distinctly missing from DSL and cable is the remote maintenance capabilities. If you have a competent ISP and telco they can do good tests looping nearly each component in the circuit and pushing patterns through, and that usually helps find the problem before a truck rolls. In the hands of a competent ISP and telco who's responsive, this helps time to repair dramatically.

DSL and cable are both in general much worse on reliability and repair, but some of their circuits end up being rock solid in places where T1s haven't been.

Even expensive SONET, ATM, Ethernet-over-SONET, and Ethernet-over-metro fiber circuits have been mixed on reliability. Where's my %#%##^%$@ five-nines? Some of those circuits cost big dollars, and what I get from the telcos when they go down are big excuses.

There's still too much of a dumb-luck component to Internet circuit reliability, unfortunately.
 
Originally posted by: spidey07
Originally posted by: kevnich2
I don't think their obselete at all, for the reasons Spidey mentioned. There are still places that don't have cable service but DO have phone and you can get a T1 from that, though it is much more costly, it will work.
Click to expand...

Not to mention I haven't seen any business use broadband. It's ALWAYs T1, T3, SONET or they just building their own optical network.
Click to expand...

A lot of small businesses use "business cable" I do a lot of consulting for small to medium sized businesses (5-30 employees) and for most triple 9 uptime does not outweigh the cost for monthly T service.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top