If a business can get a fiber optic connection than why are T1 and T3 lines still offered, which can cost hundreds of dollars a month? My home internet is no more than $50 a month through Verizon, very reliable, and I get 75 megabit/s downstream and 75 megabit/s upstream, and that’s not even the fastest fiber connection I could get, but its faster than either a T1 or even a T3 connection. So why is it companies still pay out their butts for these services?
The main reason is guaranteed reliability and contractually-defined service level agreements concerning % of uptime and time to repair an outage or impairment.
Just realized another one - your Verizon connection is really unusual in that it’s symmetrical.
Most DSL-type connections are wildly asymmetrical as the average home user is a great consumer of data but produces very little. My VDSL line at home, for example is delivering 25 meg down but only 2 meg up. This is great for web browsing or streaming, but terrible if you’re trying to run a server.
Commercial rates are typically an order of magnitude more expensive. I have a 100.100 fiber connection in my office with a 25/7 DSL backup. The fiber runs me $600/month and the DSL+managed BGP is another $250.
I also have a financially backed 99.9% SLA. Given that I have 40 developers accessing the internet and clients (VPN in and out) and VOIP, $850 a month is reasonable compared to the lost productivity of an unplanned outage.
With a commercial connection, you also shouldn’t have any ports blocked. If you’re running a web or email server, that’s important.
Note that the ISP has to deal with all the crap that happens when something goes wrong with one of your servers, e.g., DDoS attack, malware on the mail server suddenly spamming the universe, etc. Things that flood the local network and make life miserable for the other paying businesses.
The support difference between commercial and home users shows up when stuff goes wrong. The ISP will be more proactive in IDing the problem and helping to solve it for commercial users. For residential, it’s stuff like “Have your tried unplugging and plugging the modem?”
Data T1 certainly is obsolete for anything but the most lightweight use. At 1.5Mbps you’re looking at nearly 2 minutes to transfer 10MB (file download, email attachment, etc). It’s only 10 seconds at 50Mbps. Time spent waiting around for slow transfers is wasted money.