Oops, you’re right, I’m so rusty with this crap. My mistake
They advertise 100 down here but it only comes with 5 up instead of 15.
I checked on their site, and the 100 speed isn’t mentioned, so I’m going from memory. Generally, in my experience with Charter, the ratio of down : up is about 10:1, with a slight bias towards a boosted up speed. I recall the tech saying 15, but who knows what they actually settled on?
I get 5Mb/sec up with 30Mb/sec down now as shown by actual tests, so it would seem logical that with a tripling of the down speed, the up speed would also triple. 15 isn’t unreasonable in that case, and I sure could use it.
I work in big league, high stakes IT so I can see both sides of the argument. You are correct that T1 or T3 lines don’t offer good speed for the price. I have 50mb/s down and 10mb/s up at my place for $80 a month. The lines at work cost at least 50 times the price for less speed (I don’t know exactly because I don’t pay those bills).
However, you can’t run a critical business on consumer grade cable or DSL lines. It doesn’t have the routing features to do it for one. In largesr businesses, the signals get split off into all kinds of dedicated subnetworks that run everything from the phone systems to computers to printers to time clocks among other things. The provider typically handles the internal hardware like routers and switches that run those too.
As noted, what you are really paying for is insurance and support in an emergency. You can always have someone come and replace internal or external equipment with just one phone call 24/7/365. That is absolutely essential for businesses ranging from banks to manufacturing facilities where the few thousand dollars a month you pay for services would be dwarfed by any significant downtime.
We had an incident last year where a driver in a bucket truck drove down the street from a nearby construction site with the bucket up and not only wiped out all the power and network lines to the building, he also snapped off the poles themselves and almost killed a couple of people in the process. All of the companies that supported each thing that was wiped out had to work as fast as possible to restore it and they had it all back 12 hours later. You wouldn’t get that with a $75 a month home connection.
You also get routine support and troubleshooting for things like new IT infrastructure that needs to be rolled out. You can get as many network specialists on the phone as needed for as long as you need for whatever project you are working on 24 hours a day. Most regular people don’t need that level of service but it is invaluable if you do.
About ½ the places I go on the net, my pipe, computer, etc. is faster than the pipe or the servers have or their ability to serve it up.
All the $ & speed on my end does not make these sites any faster.
Now faster up speeds would be worth something to me.
I do not do music, movies, porn or torrent anything.
People who put up 12,000k pictures need to be shot, I should not have to pay for stupid speeds just because they are too lazy to properly size their picture.
Get off my lawn… :::::::::::::: Grump :::::::::::::::::
A client of mine has one because, when they built their new Sports Bar location, they did not bother to check if they could get either cable or DSL at the address. The T1 was the only option for any sort of data to support customer wi-fi and streaming.
Since then, DSL became available and I moved the streaming and wi-fi over to the DSL, leaving the T1 for their POTS lines and office desktop.
By the way, I’m posting this via my gigabit up and down Google Fiber connection.
In my day we used 110 baud modems because that’s the way it was! And we liked it! We loved it!
My office has cable, and we get same-day repair service from the company. Granted, residential is not quite as quick. T1 makes no sense and couldn’t handle our rather modest traffic.
Sure to you it doesn’t make sense, but to a large financial institution it makes perfect sense. Transfers are done in bulk and can be over $100M in one shot and there can be multiple transfers in a day. There’s usually an agreement along the lines of "If the transfer completes by noon you’ll get credit for that day’s float, if it completes by midnight you’ll get credit for 1/2 day. When you’re moving billons of dollars around the cost of a T1 or T2 is trivial in comparison to the need for a secure, reliable connection.
Zoid, can you provide documentation of some kind that T1 providers guarantee five nines? Four nines? Anything? Your point seems to be that such reliability is guaranteed for T1s but not other pipes. Without an iron-clad guarantee, it’s just hope and hype.
In my experience, which is admittedly more than 10 years old, individual guarantees were in the contract and based upon the backbone the provider had available to serve the specific site. To the best of my knowledge there was not a blanket 4-9’s agreement that covered everything.
ETA - there were often painful penalties to the provider associated with out-of-service conditions that motivated the hell out of the staff to keep the service up and running.
I’ve been reading this thread, and I’m not sure anyone made the point that a lot of T1 circuits are purchased as point-to-point lines. So if we have a field office that needs to connect to the home office, we can get a dedicated T1 circuit that connects them directly, or for less money, we can get a DSL or cable modem connection that connects them to the public internet, although I don’t know how fast the ultimate connection would be to the corporate network.
T1’s are dead, except for those that don’t know any better. Any business, including banks, financial firms and high volume manufacturing firms should be using some form of metro Ethernet or fiber solution. At work, I have a metro Ethernet solution backed up with another metro Ethernet product from a different provider, entering the premises on two different sides of the facility, over a quarter mile apart. On my primary pipe, I have a SLA of 99.999% uptime - if they don’t meet that, I get significant money back and there is hell to pay on the provider side. I have symmetric 1 Gig up/down on my primary, and 100 Mb up/down on my backup, and my monthly bills are actually significantly less than we used a T3 (just T1’s bonded together).
If you’re still using a T1, you either are in a location with no other options, or shouldn’t be working in IT.
Great info!
I was unaware in Metro Ethernet - shows how long I’ve been out of that side 
Well, yes, admittedly a call in those circumstances will probably not really get me much, but did you get the point that I am saying that what I consider unacceptably slow download speeds, that have me thinking about calling in (mainly because they cause hangups in decent quality streaming video) are actually in the ballpark of the full, maximum T1 rate? Usually I do not bother calling when this happens, because it rarely takes more than an hour or so for speeds to get back to their normal range (something between 10 and 30 Mbs down) even without a call.
When I have actually had a problem at my end (generally with teh Wi-Fi) I have found my ISP’s techs pretty helpful, even if they do all have Indian accents. (Unlike tech s at some other ISPs I have dealt with, they actually believe me when I tell them what I have already tried.)
Also if my service goes out altogether (as opposed to slowing down to rates comparable to T1), the company does seem to be pretty fast to get onto it. On the few occasions I have tried to call in about a complete outage, I have found that there is already a recorded message saying that they know about the outage in my area and are working on it. (It may be several more hours before it is actually fixed, but presumably outages like this are normally due to something like physical damage to a cable, and T1 surely cannot be immune to that sort of thing, or any easier to fix.)
Suuuuure you did…
(I started on 2400, and worked with my ISP to install and configure a 9600 line for me to use.)
I just happened to call Charter for a billing thing and asked about the 100 speed. It is indeed 100 down/ 5 up – $120/mo + $199 setup fee, wowsers.
Different circumstances?What you mean by that? Well this amount of money for this speed is really pathetic indeed.
Every time I check it seems to be a little different, and of course there might be regional diffs, too. Also, that might be the standalone charge; if you get other Charter services like TV & phone, there is a considerable bundle discount, and I’ve never been charged install fees to enhance (or dehance) the bundle as long as there was no physical wiring change or a service visit. Charter now will give you a modem to install yourself, free, if you feel competent.
That’s correct. Perhaps you misunderstand me. I get 50Mb/sec download speed, and 10Mb/sec upload speed. I upload up about 10 gigabytes of data a week. When I upload that data, I am getting the 10Mb/sec upload speed consistently of about 1+ish MB/sec, so it seems my ISP’s claims of 10Mb/sec and speednet.net’s claims of 10Mb/sec upload speeds are valid.
So, yes, that all conforms to what you said, so either I’m missing something, or you’re misunderstanding me.
I just did a speed test of my cable modem and got 1.00 Mbps up and 5.22 Mbps down and that is fine with me. Considerable improvement over a couple years ago. The phone company (who I abandoned for cause several years ago) has been advertising their fiber everywhere service and I assume this is just competition. I tested it around 7:50 PM, pretty much prime time.