Does Your Business Need To Shop T1 Prices?

Written by: Jeff Abramson, Telecom Advisor - Jan 6, 2009

If slow speeds, service outages, or poor VoIP call quality are driving you crazy, it may be time to install a T1 line. All three issues are common drawbacks of inexpensive DSL and Cable Internet access.

Because DSL and Cable Internet Access are both shared network technologies, their speeds can fluctuate dramatically during busy traffic times. These fluctuations can kill business productivity, and cause poor performance in bandwidth intensive applications like VoIP, Video streaming, large file transfers and complicated database access. In addition, most DSL or Cable services only offer minimal upload speeds. This alone can be a problem for many businesses. Especially, for those trying to use the connections for VoIP.

Another negative for both DSL and Cable internet access is that both are down to often and slow to come back up. Outages frequently last for days not hours. Bottomline - they are inexpensive and sometimes fast (upload speeds up to 6 Mbps), but very unreliable options.

If you need high-speed internet access, and reliable performance is critical for your business, you need T1 internet access. A T1 is limited to delivering 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth, but T1s deliver a constant speed. They don’t fluctuate. They give you a rock solid speed in the 1.5 Mbps range. Because of the stability of the speed, you'll find a single T1 line to perform dramatically better for your business than a 6.0M upload by 768K download DSL or Cable service. We have hundreds of Hotels, Motels, schools, etc., that each operate successfully on their own private T1 line. Best of all if you ever out grow one T1, most T1 providers can increase your bandwidth to multiple T1s fairly easily.

In addition, T1s usually have a SLA (Service Level Agreement). These agreements usually guarantee 99.999% uptime, minimum packet loss and low latency. This is backed up by a 24/7 tech support department that monitors the T1 and the provider's network constantly. If there are any performance issues on your T1 or an outage, the techs immediately begin to diagnose and troubleshoot the issue. Service resotoration mean times are usually guaranteed at less than four hours.

Unfortunately, you do have to pay more for these T1 advantages. Business class DSL or Cable service runs between $99 and $250 per month, depending on the speed and the plan. T1 prices start as low as $299 per month, making it an attractive option to small businesses with mission critical applications. If maintaining your business productivity is critical to your business, you should consider T1 Internet access.