DrArkaneX wrote:
I was just out and about searching for prices for t1's, FiOS and the like for a client of mine that's looking to move his data center but wants a cost effective bandwidth pipe. Currently he has a T1 circuit from AT&T in Hendersonville. While I understand that mainly you are paying the circuit cost just for having the ability to have a T1 and then you pay for the actual bandwidth on top of the circuit fee. His Monthly bill is $650 for a T1 (1.544mBit up and down). Now, correct me if i'm wrong but 1.544 mBit translates into 170kBps download and upload speeds. This seems slow by today's standards.

Ok, Fast forward, I got a quote on a FiOS line in New Hampshire. The sales rep stated that the bandwidth and circuit costs for a 30mBit up and down would run $233/month with 16 static IP's. Holy shit. Are you for real? Why does Comcast have to be such assholes and dominate the Tennessee area and won't let Verizon or AT&T setup shop here? To me that sounds like a monopoly, and if this is true, Comcast is operating in the state of Tennessee Illegally according to Federal standards. I thought Tennessee was part of the "Union". Ok, now I know that AT&T is not the best thing to roll through here but if AT&T wins their case against Comcast, that means that the door will be wide open for other technologies to roll through here. Just like it used to be (i.e. ISDN). I for one welcome the AT&T lawsuit and hope that they win against Comcast because this will mean that Comcast will have to be more competitive to keep up with a 30mBit pipe to a residential house.

HAHAHA! You should probably do some searching on Memestreams for ATT, monopoly, and telecom. You'll get an eyeful of why the world is so fucked up.

There's a big difference in T1 and something like FiOS or even Comcast broadband. The big difference is over-subscription. All bandwidth is oversubscribed (meaning that they sell more bandwidth than they have capacity to fulfill if everyone pegged their line simultaneously). T1 networks have far lower oversubscription ratios than something like Comcast. Comcast is probably running at 100:1 or worse (I've seen estimates of 500:1). The T1 networks are probably closer to 10:1 up to maybe 50:1 depending on the underlying architecture. Bellsouth was heavily frame relay while most newer networks are switched IP now. What this means is that you'll get sustained transfers that are much closer to your theoretical ceiling than something on Comcast, which frankly struggles to even provide ISDN rates during peak periods (like weekends). Supposedly that's why you pay more. But the other reason is that the infrastructure that supports trunk lines is more expensive on a per port basis than something like Comcast.

Ultimately true competition would help reduce costs. Not necessarily for apples to apples services (T1 vs T1) but between apples and oranges (T1 vs WiMax or T1 vs FTTH). But that topic has been beaten to death on here and everywhere else where people have a clue about telecommunications and economics.

The difference is a quality issue. Just because a highway has 16 lanes doesn't mean you can drive faster than a 4 lane. Traffic, routing, uptime, latency, support, and other factors come into play.

For example, I used to have a T1 through Epoch Networks (now Netiface). The round trip packet time from my house to a friend at Google was 48 milliseconds. Consider that light speed would be about 32 milliseconds, the actual routing time was very impressive. That same connection on my DSL (also rated at 1.5Mbps) is 117 ms.

TCP traffic is "signed for" one packet at a time, so when you are transferring something, you have dead-air while you wait for the ACKnowledgement packet to return. This is why you probably don't get the full rated speed on a DSL line (note that you can start multiple transfers to different points and probably get a total of whatever you are rated for).

In terms of uptime, our contract stated that we received a $100 credit for every hour we were "down." "Down" meant greater than 1% packet loss or greater than 85ms average backbone latency in the U.S. It also stated that they had to contact us within 20 minutes of any outage or they would pay more penalties. I recall one day that I unplugged the router to move it. Not even 10 seconds later I got a call, "Hello, this is network operations. We show your circuit is down and we don't know why yet. We show everything good up to the green box in front of your building, so we're dispatching two technicians from opposite directions to check it out." If you called NocOps, they answered the phone faster than 911, never put us on hold, and never had to transfer us. We paid $1100/month including the lease of a Cisco router.

Ultimately, the economy shifted and I can't afford that kind of phone bill anymore. I have a DSL through a 3rd party and I have peering agreements with two neighbors to trade traffic on their broadband and DSL connections (we mesh network wirelessly and QoS our own traffic higher so sharing doesn't hurt our own connectivity.)

Final thought is that the most expensive part of a T1 is the "last mile" from the phone system to your premise. You can save a lot of money by putting your servers at the phone company ("colocation"), but if you need bandwidth for office workers, that won't help.

Good luck.