A T3? Good idea. Missbunny, you’ve got $2000+ a month for that don’t ya? I think she was looking for a way to come down on the expense, not increase it. A DS3 supports 28 DS1 channels, equivalent to 672 voice channels.
Oh the heck with it. Here’s the whole magilla (applies to North American Hierarchy):
(T-2 and T-4 are used almost exclusively by the telcos, with T-4s used in carrier backbone networks. They are generally not available for end user consumption.)
T stands for either Trunk or Terrestrial, depending on who you talk to and usually refers to the actual physical line. DS stands for Digital Signal and refers specifically to the signal before it enters the channel bank in the CO. It is a nit-pickity difference and many people use the term interchangeably.
OC-1 = 51.84 Mbps
OC-3 = A sonet channel equal to three DS-3s, or 155.52 Mbps.
OC-12 = 622.08 Mbps
OC-48 = 2.488 Gbps
OC-192 = 9.953 Gbps
OC-256 = 13.271 Gbps
We can stop there. OC stands for Optical Carrier; an OC-256 will accommodate 172,032 voice circuits, which is equivalent to 7,168 DS-1s or 256 DS-3s.
I second the idea of using a combination of Cable & DSL. My cable provider (Optimum Online) offers a business connection for about $100/month. Even if in your area they charge twice as much, that’s less than $500/month for the two vs. the $1600 you’re currently paying, and your bandwidth will be higher. The only question is: do you have a lot of outgoing traffic, such as a web site (can’t run one off a cable modem, they don’t allow it, and many DSL providers don’t allow it either)? ADSL (Asymmetical DSL) & Cable modems both have outbound bandwidth that is much lower than inbound (for example, my outbound is restricted to 1 Mb/sec, vs. about 6 Mb inbound, but that’s still faster than what you’re seeing now). SDSL (Symmetical DSL, which your quote may have been for, since it seems a little high) has the same mandwidth in both directions, and usually can be used for hosting web sites.
You guys, thanks again, I have been totally consumed with setting up the new computers we bought and haven’t read the board for a couple of days - :eek: - last night was a 10:30 PM night and looks like tonight will be too. I only have time right now to quickly scan the new posts - I’ll try to answer some of the questions tomorrow.
I’ll tell you one thing, my head’s going to explode over this. I really really HATE telecom/bandwidth/Web access stuff. Kilt-WM, I’ll check my e-mail shortly.
DSL and T1 lines are two types of digital data transfer services. DSL services are considerably cheaper and may offer faster but less consistent download speeds. T1 lines have fast, consistent download and upload speeds.
It’s obvious by the vast difference in price between DSL and T1 that they are not the same.This is the most noticeable difference between DSL and T1 lines is the price. T1 subscription prices can be as much as 10 times more than DSL subscription prices. In addition, laying a T1 line to a service location costs considerably more than installing DSL on a pre-existing phone line…A T1, weighing in at over $500 per month, has a throughput of one and a half megabits per second (1.5 Mbps). DSL, with an average price point of less than $100 per month, also claims 1.5 Mbps speeds.
When compared to Cable and DSL connections, Internet T1 lines are dedicated solely to you and your business. By not sharing broadband with the masses, your T1 connection’s reliability and speed remains intact - regardless of the amount of traffic or the location. Moreover, T1 connections offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that guarantee up to 99.99% uptime, quick response times, etc.
They’ve done some really nice things with single pairs since then. Back in 2001, we were talking about 384k DSL lines. Today, I’ve got a 50meg VDSL line at home.
The issue of uptime and SLA (service level agreement) remains true though. I may be getting inbound speeds similar to an OC-1, but it is still DSL from the ILEC, so reliability is not exactly “six nines” - Last month, it went down mid-day for about as long as it takes for a DSL bridge to hiccup and re-synch, but the month before that, we were down for seven hours. All I got from AT&T on that was “We do apologize that you are having this difficulty” and minor reassurance that it was a regional issue affecting many customers. In fairness to AT&T, it was a dig-in at a highway construction site that ripped out a few fiber trunks, but still, if I had an OC-1, the apologies would be rather more tangible and effective.