T1 or cable

[shane254]

hey is a T1 faster than a cable modem and about how long on each would it take to download a 5 mb file

[Great_One]

No Contest: T-1 is allways faster than a cable modem

With dedicated T-1 you get the full continous bandwidth.
Cable modems are a shared medium and subject to bandwidth fluctations depending on the number of users at any given time.

[mairving]

If you had a T1 line all to yourself, you would still only have 1.5Mb/sec going for you. Add a bunch of users and there goes your bandwidth. My cable modem speed is 2.5-3.0 Mb's which I share with no one. Cable is much faster for me but it would depend on how much you are sharing with your neighbors. It certainly mucho cheaper.

[bob]

Great_One spoke truth.

I would lose my job if I proposed removing our T1's that cost hundreds $ per month to connect our WAN to the internet via cable. It would be nice if we could only pay $50 a month for a faster cable connection.

mairving - if you can show me how I will split my bonus with you. We are takling a 6 figure bonus if you are right.

T1's are for corporations - cable is for home connections or small to moderate web sites.

T1's have 24 .... 64Kb channels that can be fully used.

Cable..... ???? Mbs faster ... how many channels I dont know. Guess if you were the only user you would have faster access - but with a T1 you are the ONLY user always.

[mairving]

Please let me clarify something. I am simple saying that for personal use, I believe cable is better. I'm not saying that you should move your business to a cable. To me it's a matter of economics, the price of a T1 line at home to the price of cable. Cable, at least in my area, provides the most bang for the buck. I can't see an average home user trying to set up a T1 line.

[glc]

Have you ever seen an oversubscribed cable at 7PM? Try about the speed of a 28.8 modem. Plus, a lot of cable operators are putting caps on the bandwidth now - expect about 640k down and 128k up. With AT&T buying out most cable operators, quality and support is going downhill fast.

[Interface]

Well to put into perspective

T1 is 1.4 Mbps MAX!!

Cable Modems have a Max of 48Mbps MAX!!
When you get a cable modem for home
use they are typically capping you
at about 3Mbps max, just to be fair to
everyone getting cable modems.

It's the same with ADSL your typically
capped at about 4 Mbps, that's where
mine is capped.

If you want to pay the extra money
they can put your cable modem full
throttle, and you'd be getting
near T3 speeds.

But doing that costs $$$

All in all ADSL is better then cable modems
for security reasons, with a cable modem
your sharing the same line with everyone
else who has a cable modem in your area.
Since cable modems work just like ethernet
your packets are sent to everybody on
that cable, so they just throw up a sniffer
and they see all your lovly info, unless
your cable modem is using encryption
on your box to prevent that, even that
only makes it harder, not impossible.
With ADSL you have a direct connection
to your ISP.

Speed wise cable blows ADSL away, as far
as top end speed goes, ADSL is limited
in it's local loop distance, so cable
beets it for distance as well.

T1 are way to friggin costly, and yes
Businesses can get ADSL or cable modems,
most of the local businesses here get
ADSL or cable, for about $50 over
the cost for home users, but they only
get a certain amount of bandwidth a month
when they go over that, they pay so much
per megabyte, not sure of the amount though.

In my humble opinion, T1's really won't
be the way to go in another few years
once high speeds access is out of it's
infantsy, businesses will say hey,
SCRUE T1, too much $$$ for too limited
a bandwidth and start switching over to
ADSL and cable.

Which wont make much of a difference since
the Telco's control the ADSL market,
atleast where i'm at, NO ISP's offer ADSL
it's only availble from the local Telco.
And only the cable companies offer Cable
modems, ISP's don't get those Either.

Gotta love how big business keeps control
of everything but hey if i was them
i would do the same.

PS. Excuse the spelling mistakes
i've got the flue and i'm drugged up



------------------

[bob]

No one would suggest a T1 for home use.

[mbossman2]

while ADSL and its variants have a lot of promise, for most businesses it is not very viable. the big problem with DSL is it is really a point to point solution and all your traffic needs to pass thru an ISP to get its destination. One big issues for any WAN traffic across the internet is the lack of quality of service. the internet does not offer any commited information rates (CIR's) that telco's do for their T1 services.

T1's offer point to multipoint traffic (via frame relay) without having to submit that traffic to the internet and the lack of quality of service.

that is not to say that that will never change, but for now, DSL is fine for companies that strictly want internet access,. if your company wants to do any of the following:
Voice over IP (toll quality)
H323 video conferencing
then DSL is not the choice, t1's within a frame relay is the way to go.

[bob]

Cable speeds sound good - I admit that I have not really researched them very much.

But T1 lines that are multiplexed (all are) can support the bandwith. With 1500 directly connected computers I can still watch live CNN video.

Still wondering how the cable companies connect to the internet. Doubt they run cable to UUNET to get on the main ring --- if they do would like to know. Most likely they use T1'1 , T2's or even more than T3's.

[Dave22]

My guess is OC and not T carrier, but I'm sure it varies among cable companies.

quote:

---

Still wondering how the cable companies connect to the internet. Doubt they run cable to UUNET to get on the main ring --- if they do would like to know. Most likely they use T1'1 , T2's or even more than T3's.

---

[shane254]

have you ever heard of wireless t1
that is what we are getting
he said we can expect speeds or 80k a sec is this true what is the speed on ground T1

[glc]

A T-1 is 1.54 mega*bits* a second by definition. Divide by 8 for mega*bytes*. 80K sounds like about half the speed of a wired T-1.

[mbossman2]

how a service provider ties into their upstream provider is dependant on server things: the number of customers, their caching capabilities etc. small local service providers usually use t1's (quantities vary), as they are less expensive than t3's (so are the routers that run them). medium sized will use t3's on the low end or oc-3 pipes.

your large providers will use oc-12's and the backbone providers will use oc-48 or the newish oc-192 (this is the sprint/mci class provider)

now as to wireless and t1: point to point wireless will run faster than a t1, as they run at the low end of 2.5Mbps up to 11mbps, there is some new gear out there that will provide 100mbps transfer rates.

[eltano1]

Can someone enlight me about OC? I have no idea what it is (I'm still learning thanks to you guys).

[mbossman2]

t1's and t3's are copper lines, whereas OC-3, 12, 48 and 192 are optical cables.

copper has a bandwidth limitation with current technology, the OC's have a much higher bandwidth (oc-3 carries 155 mbps)

[Dave22]

...not to mention that fiber/OC doesn't have the distance limitations that copper has or the susceptibility to noise.

[vitalstatistix]

Fiber has repeaters to overcome distance limitations! Copper doesnt have that luxury! A fibre cable wih no repeaters and no distance limitation will probably qualify to be a "Perpetual Motion Machine of First Kind". Or Second kind .. i am bit off touch with 'clasical thermodynamics'.

copper . on cat5 .. with ATM can support upto 622.5 MBPS .. utilising all 4 pairs in fully duplex . but this is not for Last Mile Linkages. OC192 u get in terms of Gigabits of Dwnld speeds. U are then dealign with SDH /SDLC / kind of topology and ATM as the protocol. Ethernet is no goood there.

Secondly, someone above mentioned QoS from ISP, well, if your ISP cannot provide you QoS then either you r not paying enuff to your ISP or They are incompetent bunch. FYI, any TIER-1(or 2) ISP will be happy to give you upto 50% of CIR (way above FR)

Wireless can give you upto Fast Ethernet speeds. But is subject to wide level of connectvity issues and licensing too you are dealing with freq range over 2.3 GHz (every country has its onw Freq controls)

VDSL (1 KM in ULL) can give you upto 55+ MBpS of P2P connectivity speeds. For finer details checkout with your local Telco

as regards usage for VoIP and H323 suff, its not UR QoS wit ur own ISP but ur end to end travel time for a voice packet must be less then 150 ms one way. The biggest latency comes from the !@#$% packet shaping devices or inline caching engines used by smaller ISP' and technology gets the bad name!