Tuesday, March 1, 2011

What is a T1?

Working with a number of growing small and medium sized companies, the question often comes up when they are adding more applications or are looking to add staff - What is a T1? and when does it make sense to move from DSL or regular individual business lines?

When in doubt, my fav is still Wikipedia. If your not technical (which I am not) here is a simplified summary:

Standard telephone lines can transfer data and voice at a rate of about 30,000 bits per second (30 kbps) using a dial-up modem. A T1 line can transmit 1.544 megabits per second, or can be used to transmit 24 digitized voice channels.

A T1 can be used for business phone service, connectivity to the Internet or data transfer on a network which is a direct link between business locations.

The benefit of a T1 is that it's up to 60 times faster than a traditional modem. For businesses, if you have more than 8 phone lines, T1 is less expensive and provides super fast scalability when you need to add lines because the pipe is already there. For Internet, it means faster upload/download speeds.

To net it out, faster and cheaper. Mind you it's only faster and cheaper if you have more than 8 phone lines or your employees are frustrated with waiting for Internet applications to refresh. Otherwise - you might as well stay with what you have.

If you want to know if you really need a T1, you should talk to your provider. There are a few tools you can test your DSL speed if that is your concern. Check out http://avega.ca/avega/?page_id=165.

All the best,

Susan Corcoran

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