(disclaimer: I tried to search for any previous thread on this, but T1 is not recognized by search engine)
My company’s t1 costs about $800 and gets about 1.5m/second up and down stream. My cable modem at home gets about 3.5mbps/second down and 98kbps/second up for $50. My understanding is that att/comcast keeps upstream limited so you can’t run a server, etc.
My questions are:
Why is there such a disparity between residential and corporate prices?
Is there something about upstream that is more costly?
Can I sign my company up for cable modem for $50 - $100 and get some sort of cheap redundancy (ISDN, 4 56K combined lines, etc) for an expected lower uptime comittment?
BTW, we don’t run servers out of our office … that is outsourced.
What’s the real deal, why am I paying 16 times more at the office for slower speed?
I’d say, and this is a WAG, that when you are paying corporate prices you get something that’s critical to most companies, namely stability. That, and (please correct me if I’m wrong) the fact that a cable modem isn’t a very good solution for connection sharing with multiple IPs. While I can’t speak for your provider, it is in my experience that most ISPs wont let you use a product aimed at private citizen in a corporation.
The limit on upstream may stem from what you suggest, that they wish to keep users from running servers. Another plausible explenation is that it is cheaper to offer less bandwidth and since most users download a lot more than what they upload it’s financially smart to offer less upstream.
T-1 lines are a legacy technology , and you paying that kind of price because they can set the rates. Back when most companies operated anything from a 300 baud modem to a 56 k modem, a T-1 was light speed.
I dont know about your area to make a guess , but using cable on a residential neighbor hood where i live , you had frequent drop off in service , long lag times and they got irritated when you hooked up a hub or a router to share the connection.
You should be looking at switching over to an Adsl line , which is a decendant of the T-1 , giving a slower speed than cable, but its stable and it only has one connection , rather than up to eight that a cable line would carry.
Make your telco work for you , and have them send a rep by to see what kind of package you can get.
My mother used to work for the phone company. She worked in the office/admin end of repair. When I asked her about the disparity between residential and business rates she explained that part of the reason was that businesses have the expectation of 100% uptime.
Sure, there are always outages but restoration of business service had priority over residential. If necessary the phone company would even provide alternate connections for business. I think that’s part of it.
I have half of our local airport online with Bellsouth DSL. It has T1 range download speeds, and has been down maybe 10 minutes over the past two years.
It’s something like $80 a month. I can’t see any reason to go with a T1, myself.
Just to address some of the issues, I have worked at this company for about the same time as I have had my cable modem (2 years). Each have had similar downtimes (about 2 days total). Regardless, I understand that you have to pay for reliability.
Anyway, say I get a cable modem from comcast and DSL from quest, each about $50/month. Chances of both going down at same time are slim (barring a digging error outside my building, which would take down a T as well). Now I have redundancy at 1/8 the cost of a T and critical operations (email, etc.) can take place even if one goes down.
No operator is going to offer these prices to a business, but at some point, the price gap has to close significantly.
As others have said, it’s all about reliability. In my experience, BellSouth will fall over itself getting your T1 back online if your business goes down, but by the same token they are perfectly content to let your residential DSL service languish for days.
The way the cable company I work for runs is the difference in cost can also be linked to other things:
Your a priority in business. When I go to work, my day is fully routed with jobs. If a business calls in, I have to drop everything and rush over to restore service. Then go back to where I left off, with all the same jobs.
A business is more likely to be uploading/downloading 24/7 than a resident. Therefore, they take up more resources from a Node than Residents.
Most residents do not use a Static IP. This means that a residents IP Address is always changing. A business is assigned an IP (or several) and they remain the same.
That’s all I can think of right now. Hope it helps.