[lug] residential T1

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2000 at 01:24:01AM -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:
>T1 is provisioned over plain ol' copper.  Distance limitations apply,
>but are more flexible than DSL.  There's also the usual requirement for

Distance limitations?  Point To Point T1s are priced based on distance,
and running from Fort Collins to Boulder isn't anything overly hard for
them to deal with.  I've dealt with T1s running from Washington state
to Colorado...  They aren't cheap though.  Fort Collins to Boulder is
around $800/month just for line charges...

>telephone lines and puts them into multi-T1's upstream.  Telco's like to 
>blame fiber because it sounds a lot better than saying that they've been

Most of those problems that I know are because they run fiber from the
switch out to a pedestal in your area, and from there break down the
N 64kbps channels into a bunch of copper pairs.  They're still giving you
64kbps though, it's not like those multi-line concentrators that are
commonly installed to give you two lines over one pair in the neighborhoods
where they don't have enough copper to the houses...

Are you sure that they're cutting into your 64kbps channel when using these
fiber extenders?

Last time I was pulling a lot of phone lines into a house though, they
actually pulled in extra copper to my house -- I had 6 lines at the
time.  They even asked me what I thought I'd need in the future, I
told them to put in a couple of spares...

>of those circuits because of the extra A-to-D conversion done in the

AFAIK, once you go from A to D at the pedestal, you're digital back to the
switch and probably digital all the rest of the way to your destination
switch where it'll eventually get turned back into analog.

Now, the question is: Why aren't they installing DSLAMs in the remote
boxes where they put the equipment that takes fiber and turns it into
copper?  When I was up in Canada I asked the tech installing my ADSL
line about that and he said that's exactly what they were doing --
they could offer ADSL to 95% of the phone subscribers in the city.

Apparently the story is that USPest doesn't want to install them there
because then they'd have to open those boxes up to JATO and the like
to install THEIR equipment in.  So, you don't get DSL because the telco
is afraid of competition.  That's just a story I heard from a reliable
source who heard it from a "Whatever they want to call us this week"
technician.

That was, IIRC, the same technician that was telling the story about
how they had gotten a call telling them not to wear any USWest clothing
or other things that said USWest on it, until the new QWorst clothing
could be rolled out.  "Yeah, except I'm driving around in this truck
with *US WEST* written all over it in foot high letters!".

>Many ISP's require that you buy the half of the circuit that goes to
>THEM also, your side alone won't cut it.  And some, like the

PTP T1s are dedicated circuits, so it's not really broken up into
"ends".  A Frame Relay T1 for example can have multiple clients
hanging off one line at the ISP side, but a PTP T1 is just like
a wire from you to your ISP.  The problem is that Frame Relay
costs around $375 per end (but no distance charges).

>Also, if you go the Co-Op route, make them GUARANTEE you a throughput
>rating to somewhere UPSTREAM.  If you've ever seen their MRTG graphs
>from their routers, you'll know why I say that.  Their pipes are

I've seen their MTRG graphs and the coop seems to be VERY good about
proactively getting bandwidth.  Considering that they're mostly installing
DS3s, and those can take months of negotiations, they seem to do a
pretty good job of it, but that usually means that by the time one
DS3 is in they're starting the process for ordering another one.

Of the ISPs in the area, the COOP is most likely to be able to give
you bandwidth and lots of it, unless you start going for the big
national backbone providers charging (as I understand it) around
3 to 5 times the cost.