Posted: 11/2/2005 12:25:20 PM EDT
| I was just doing some research on advertised speeds for high speed internet options. My question is, why do companies pay 100 times the amount for T1 lines (advertised 1.5mbps up/down) when Cable and ASDL service providers advertise 1.5-6 mbps down/768 up. Just wondering. |
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1.5mbit T1 > 6mb Cable, ADSL, etc.... The service offered by the cable and adsl providers not only will have terms and conditions, but they are also counting on their customers not using the entire bandwidth of that connection all the time. For example, I work for an ISP, and we provide wireless broadband service to customers in a couple of towns in northeast oregon. We have approximately 200 customers in this area, but only two T1s feeding the service. and that is more than enough. |
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Those same cable/dsl companies also charge businesses about three times more for the same package they are giving residential users. But here is the main reasons I prefer T1's in a work environment. 1. Stability. I have a lot less outages with a good T1 then with a cable modem. 2. Flexibility. I can buy whole range of static IP's, host my own services, etc. 3. Bandwidth. 1.5 MB up is alot better then 768KB up, especially when you think about hosting services like Web and VPN over the internet. 4. Support. Most T1 packages come with a great support package. IE, the T1 goes down, and you have someone there to fix, within an hour or so. A cable/dsl trouble call can take a lot longer. I still think business DSL is a pretty good deal for small networks, I admin a few networks on them, and have no problems. To really reliably host services you need a stable, consistent connection, and a T1 just does that a whole lot better then a cable/dsl modem. Also, most cable/dsl packages have in the user agreement that they are for entertainment purposes only, so there is no uptime gurantee. Also you are not supposed to host services on most of them. A good T1 package will have uptime gurantees, and that peace of mind adds a lot. |
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I'm responsible for about 120 locations, each with from 5-100 users in my organization. We use business-class cable at almost every one, including the headquarters which has about 100 users plus a bunch of (web) hosted services. Why? Cost, plus our connectivity has been great. |
Because your cable/DSL speed is "up to." The T1 lines (and better) have Service Level Agreements to guarantee their performance. As a cable user, you share a hub with everyone else in your neighborhood. That hub is rated at the speeds you quote. Come 6pm everyone gets online and kills the performance. Your throughput goes down, packet collisions go up, and you basically get timeouts. This is one case where you typically DO get what you pay for. |
What he said. Main reason for me is that I can get a whole bunch of static IPs, which I can't get with SDSL or it would take the price way up. |
I love being called a nerd before answering a question.  A point-to-point T1 has a few advantages: 1. It is available in most areas (I can get one at my place, out in the middle of nowhere, for example). 2. The bandwidth you are paying for is guaranteed. 3. They are typically sold with a service level agreement. i.e., the problem will be resolved within 'x' hours, 99.999% uptime, etc. 4. You can purchase a full class C - great if you have a ton of network devices that need to be publicly addressable. 5. The TOS are much less restrictive - i.e., you can run servers or whatever else you like. 6. The TOS usually allows you to resell the bandwidth. 7. They are a great way to connect remote sites, forming a WAN. The links between sites are used by you and you only. Businesses buy them for the support, the reliability, the guaranteed bandwidth, and the flexibility to use it as they see fit. It comes at a price. |
I think it can really go both ways BayEagle. Right now I am on business DSL at my location, with about 50 users and a few web services hosted here. So far it has been fine, but some cable companies really have just an old/bad infastructure, which forces alot of these businesses to go for a T1. I can say, I don't think they should be so damned expensive, but whenever I have had to admin a network that was on one, it was no worries. I think though, as companies build better broadband networks (ie; verizon), that we will probably see more and more companies switching over to business cable/dsl. Untill then, I just can't see business cable/dsl really outperforming a solid T1. But, as you proved, there are always exceptions. |
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The company I work for is a hosting provider and gives us discounts on T1s. 150/mo. No installation fee, only pay for the loopback through SBC. I'd like to get one once I get some of my debt settled for several reasons which have already been stated above. Currently we have DSL at my house and it does what it's supposed to, but I need a bigger pipe for some of the projects I want to undertake (ie lab, server colo...etc). If I could, I think I would rather have FIOS. |
True. You do get what you pay for. I had a customer (Comcast) complain that we could not geta tech out immediately because he was on the residential service. I explained to him that the folks running business on the buisiness class accounts were serviced first. He said he was a buisiness and it was costing him $10k a day to be down. I asked him why he chose to go cheap and get a residential account for business. He said it cost too much. 
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Do you work Tech Support for Comcast? If so, I feel your pain. I worked support for Mediacom once, and I have to say, it just about gave me an anger problem I often told people, if it was'nt for the "mute" button, man I would have been fired so many times by now. |
I should also mention that the benefits of connecting remote offices with T1 circuits become really noticeable when your company makes the inevitable move to IP Telephony.  There is no longer a need to maintain a T1 for voice, and another for data - one for both will suffice. And, since you have control over the equipment on both ends, you can imlement QoS, so that voice quality can be guaranteed over the WAN link. Even cooler, is If your New York office needs to call a customer in Los Angeles, you can send the call over the T1, and out your Los Angeles office's voice gateway as a local call. Neat, huh?You could certainly implement cheap DSL circuits at your remote offices, but forming a WAN would require a VPN - and you'd lose the ability to use QoS, since you can't do QOS over the internet. |
Why answer then? I know the answer to his question, but I wasn't going to say anything. 
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I considered the possibility that "nerd" was a term of endearment. "And dude, 'nerd' is NOT the preferred nomenclature. 'Geek', please". 
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Mute buttons rule. I worked for an outsource company that did Comcast, SBC, Hughes/DirecWay, Bellsouth and AT&T. I am so glad I dont work there anymore. Thick skin is required for sure. But after 5 years of support, my outlook on the world at large was very jaded. Most people I talked to were stupid and rude. |
At this point, Frame Relay T1 is better for a WAN than VPN, until they get faster backbones everywhere. |
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We have DSL, cable, and a T1 to Sprint running to our office. The difference is (obviously) the upload speed, but the bigger difference is service and the speed of repairs. The DSL works only at night after about 10PM until 7AM in the morning, and Bell$outh won't even send someone out to try to make it work better or refund us for downtime since they only guarantee "a best effort." BellSouth didn't even send someone out for the install. They mailed the DSL modem. The people that answer the support lines at BellSouth are rude idiots. I don't know about the local BellSouth employees that work on DSL because I've never seen one. The cable is blazing fast on downloads when it works. I often can download at the full rated 3Mbps download speeds. When it quits, it's usually two weeks before Charter will get around to sending someone out. Charter won't even bother to replace the cable from the pole to our building that's one of the problems. Charter refuses to credit us for downtime. We were down for four months about a year ago, and they wouldn't credit us a penny. The people that answer the phone for Charter are some of the nicest and polite support people I've ever talked to, but they hire contractors locally that have zero training and have no idea what they're doing. The last Charter employee that was out didn't even know the difference between the RG59 and RG6 cable he had in the back of his truck. For the T1 to Sprint, if there's a problem we will usually have someone at our office in less than two hours. When we need a configuration change to our routing or IP addresses, Sprint will usually get it done in less than 15 minutes. When the line went bad from the pole they had BellSouth replace it the same day. When the local water works cut the underground cable going to our pole, Sprint had BellSouth there in less than 5 minutes to temporarily patch the wires and had a new wire buried before the next morning. The people that answer the phones at Sprint are polite and smart. The local telco people they hire to visit the site are top notch. In the past just over ten years with Sprint, I think we've had a grand total of 20 days of downtime. For that downtime we've received over 36 months worth of credits. Two weeks ago after mentioning eight hours of downtime we had in Aug after there was a fire in their building, I got our bill knocked down by over 10% for the next year. With a T1 to someone like Sprint you get great and fast service. They stand behind the connection they sale, will fix it as fast as they can get the local telco out, and will credit you for downtime. Comparing cable/DSL to a T1 is like comparing a Kia to a tank. The Kia might be faster and cheaper, but when you go to war you need a tank.z |
Yup. |
I'll assume you mean a VPN over the Internet. That really depends on the frame provider and the ISP. I've found that running backups between us and another customer of Sprint on the other side of the country that other than a 120ms latency rather than about 60ms for a direct T1 that there is no difference when sending traffic over the Sprint Internet connection as compared to having a direct T1. With BellSouth frame relay that we had a few years ago and that several of our customers use now, there is often a good bit of packet loss and huge latency parts of the day. The frame relay connection has larger latency between two sites in the same city than Sprint does across the country on their Internet backbone. The T1 over Sprint's backbone that crosses the entire country is much better than frame relay between two sites in the same city in this case. It all just depends. If the sites are connected to the same provider then a VPN over the Internet can be much better than frame relay.z |
In our area, the net uplinks are slow, and trying to find two providers in towns 100 miles apart using the same uplink is nearly impossible. So for "Small/Regional WAN", I would go with Frame Relay T1 over Internet VPN on cable/DSL. |