cable modem vs. T1

(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:

  1. Why is there such a disparity between residential and corporate prices?
  2. Is there something about upstream that is more costly?
  3. 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?

Mod, please delete this duplicate … it got posted accidentally with back button