t1 vs cable business line

MadHatter

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 8, 2005
Messages
150
Talking with a friend about connection differences. We are having issues finding what the real differences are between a T1 and a business line (which offers substantially more down/up). He believes there are not substantial routing differences between the two. Can anyone help differ between the two?
 
The biggest is probably the SLA you get with the T1. It's rare to find a cable company that will offer you an SLA. Also you'll generally have the option of more 'advanced' services, like having public IP blocks routed to you or obtaining a BGP session from your ISP.

IMO the lack of an SLA is offset by doing failover with two different cable/DSL ISPs, and for most businesses this is fine and much less expensive. If you need the additional capabilities or uptime guarantees though the T1 (or some other leased line) is the way to go.
 
Cable is generally considered a best-effort technology without bandwidth guarantees or solid SLA's, however this varies from provider to provider. T1's are symmetical dedicated lines with (generally) much more solid SLA's since they are designed to be reliable connections from the start.

The "best" choice depends on the need of the business, and also the SLA's from the ISP's.
 
The biggest is probably the SLA you get with the T1. It's rare to find a cable company that will offer you an SLA. Also you'll generally have the option of more 'advanced' services, like having public IP blocks routed to you or obtaining a BGP session from your ISP.

IMO the lack of an SLA is offset by doing failover with two different cable/DSL ISPs, and for most businesses this is fine and much less expensive. If you need the additional capabilities or uptime guarantees though the T1 (or some other leased line) is the way to go.
agreed 100%. even bonded T1s and T3s are slow for medium businesses that do a lot of web-based applications. it's often better to get 2 separate business cable/DSL lines for redundancy because it'll be a LOT cheaper and a LOT faster.

comcast business-class is currently like 50-100mbps down and 10-25 up for a fraction of the price of a single t1. add in a slow business DSL line from verizon as a backup and you're rolling faster, for cheaper, with redundancy
 
Depends on the ISPs available in your area. In my experience with a LOT of SMB clients spread out over many different ISPs, generally business grade broadband packages are very good and reliable.

People spew out "SLA with T1". I have a few clients on Ts..and I've seen them go down, and I've dealt with getting them back up. Yes even with big ISPs providing T1s. To me SLA is overused sales hype.

Out of all the ISPs I work with, I like Comcasts business package. Good fast support (in the US..yes English speaking) when you call, you get a real voice in minutes. And their uptime is excellent.
 
I'm a big fan of ethernet services too. Lots of bandwidth on the cheap and you don't need an entire rack for a DS3 :D

Depending on your ISP, you can get symmetrical access speeds anywhere from 1mb to 10gb. All you need is a fiber transceiver on your router, some ISP's offer managed services where they will run their own router and give you a copper handoff too.
 
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