Unless I’m missing something huge, a T1 line offers exactly no advantages, especially for the price. ($200-400 a month) Does Mbs have different meanings under different circumstances, because 1.5 up and down is pretty pathetic.
What am I missing?
Advantage over what? What are you comparing it to?
Some people have had less then stellar performance from their cable or DSL providers, and if the T1 line comes from a third party, they go with the more expensive option. My hope would be that if it’s that expensive, it’s pretty freakin’ reliable.
If you’re getting a dedicated T1 the only advantage I can think of is the privacy and security, due to the “dedicated” part.
I think it also comes with a guaranteed level of service / uptime, which most DSL / Cable connections do not.
Brian
For that kind of money, you’re getting some level of *guaranteed *reliability, and technical support from a real professional who actually has the power and ability to help you. There (should) be absolutely no fucking around with outsourced first-line “did you try unplugging it?” support drones. There will be no random drops in service because your neighbor’s kid is torrenting gigabytes of porn, or because the wiring in the area is old and degrading.
As has been said what you’re paying for is reliability and security.
Imagine you’re a business that has to transmit a larger number of transactions to a central bank. You want that traffic to be secure as possible and you want to make sure that it’ll get across every single time. That’s when you need a T1 (or T3, OC3, etc.)
Well, ok, but when my cable down speed falls to anywhere near 1.5 Mbs is when I start to think about phoning my cable provider and giving them an earful. That is what I get when things aren’t working right.
With a regular DSL line you are sharing the bandwidth with a number of other subscribers. Because most internet usage happens in bursts this is not normally a problem and there is a good chance at any one moment that you can achieve close to your maximum throughput, and is a much more efficient use of bandwidth. With a dedicated line you get all the bandwidth all the time but you have to pay more because there are no other users to soak up the slack when you are not fully utilizing it.
And what do you actually get from calling your ISP, aside from some brief catharsis? You get some drone offering canned apologies, trying to sell you upgraded service, and asking you to unplug your router and wait 15 seconds. Maybe if you’re really persuasive and the drone on the end of the line has the authority, you’ll get a $1.50 credit for a day of lost service.
If there’s something actually wrong, you won’t get any help until you’ve spend a couple hours on the phone pretending you’ve been rebooting your computer over and over. Eventually your call will be elevated to a support drone who actually has access to some basic diagnostic tools, who then figures out that they might need to send a service technician to your home. So they schedule a visit for the week after next, and you stay home from work that morning because the technician is scheduled to arrive some time between 8 AM and 2 PM. And the tech actually shows up right at 4:00 when you need to go pick up your kids because hey it’s your turn if you’re staying home that day. So you reschedule. Next week, the tech shows up only one hour late and tells you that your modem is bad and you can get a replacement for $120. Another week goes by and you finally plug in your modem to get functioning service. Which still sucks for a three hour window every afternoon because that’s when the neighbor’s teenaged kid is home alone and porntorrenting.
Whereas, with your T1, you notice a drop in service. You make a call and a real human being picks up instantly. Within 10 minutes, you describe the problem, they run diagnostics, and they determine that they need to send a technician to you. One hour later the technician is there, replaces a bad connection, and everything is working again.
(Hypothetically. I’ve never actually had to call anyone about T1 service. But I’m extrapolating from the differences I’ve experienced between consumer tech support and real business grade we’ll-overnight-you-replacements-worth-six-figures tech support.)
T1 lines also have the same upload speed as download so you always have a dedicated line with 1.5 MBps up and down 24/7. My cable connection is over 3 MBps down but only .5 up. The highest service they advertise is a whopping 12.5 down and but only 0.625 up.
I wonder about the OP, too. No consumer service today offers such a slow speed, or such high prices. I can only conclude that it’s a legacy service for those who know no better.
I can get 100Mb/sec down, and 15 up, for under $75/month, on Charter cable. (30 down, 5 up, $30/month)
Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. I have 50Mb up and 10Mb down (and I do seem to get those speeds when I’m uploading up to ten gigs a week), and I’m paying $100/month with cable.
See **lazybratsche ** post. If you’re a business sending credit card transactions, you don’t need 100 MB or even 30 Mb - you need reliability. And if it goes down, you need it back up ASAP.
50 UP??? Jesus… from what company???
Your numbers do not look right. Typically, the download speed is 5 to 10 times the upload speed for consumer accounts. And I assume Mb = Megabits, but “ten gigs” = 10 GigaBytes. Sometimes we tend to play fast and loose with units.
And if you are paying “$100/month with cable,” is that Internet only, or with a bundled TV & telephone package? Sometimes we tend to play fast and loose with those things, too.
If you’re sending credit card data, and cable, satellite or DSL is not reliable enough, you need to look into 56K dialup. All the speed you need. Seriously, dude.
Those are megabits which equate to 12.5 megabytes per second down and 1.875 up, which blows away T1 in download speed and is slightly better in upload, but those are only peak numbers, you don’t get that 24/7. (Are those numbers right? I was actually using Charter numbers too, they only advertise 5mbs up with their 100 down package here.)
It’s confusing and takes careful reading of the acronym following the stated speed.
Mbps= megabits per second= 1,000,000 bits per second - cable and dsl almost always use this
MB/s= megabytes per second = 8,000,000 bits per second
Cable is a line that goes from the provider to your neighborhood and gives the neighborhood a certain bandwidth. T1 is a line that goes between you and the provider and gives you a dedicated 1.5MB/s up and down speed and a 99% uptime guarantee in writing.
That’s good enough for most small companies and although downloads may be slower, the overall package is better than what they’d get with cable or DSL. If it’s not enough, they can get a T3 line, which is 28 T1 lines. If that’s too much, they can get a fractional T3 with some of the channels turned off to get speeds (and costs) somewhere between T1 and T3.
Check your units. It’s 1.544 MegaBITS, not BYTES, per second for a T1 line. We’re talking a 8:1 ratio here, so it’s not chicken feed if you make a mistake.
99% is ridiculously poor. It represents 4 days per year with zero connection. The gold standard is “five nines”, or 99.999% uptime. Rarely guaranteed anywhere, but strived to by most.
I have consumer-grade cable, and if I only got 99% uptime, my cable company would be forced to give me a BIG rebate. I got 99.9% one year, and they gave me $50 back and an apology.
If I could only get 1.5Mb/s, I would be driving my data across town on disks. In 2013, that’s an absurdly low speed.
Fubya, in all fairness to your challenge, Charter proposed 100Mb/sec downloads two years ago. I don’t know if they have reached that level yet, as the cost was beyond what I was willing to pay, so I didn’t order it. A speed test a minute ago showed I am getting 30.2Mb/sec down, 4.52Mb/sec up, on a residential account. Commercial accounts are more money, but symmetrical, and are guaranteed to meet the minimum speeds at all times. At least if they are working at all!
As a general rule, cable/DSL did not take over from T1s for business/carrier class service because the carriers themselves did not want to cannibalize their own business and so generally, if they even offered business-class variations with equivalent SLAs, they tended to price them so that the savings was minimal (and/or spread a bit of FUD).
For serious, nailed-up, ultra-high uptime solutions, the modern replacement for a T1 is not cable or DSL, but metro ethernet.