AT&T Pushes FCC Over MSG Dispute > Irony?

reply to espaeth

Re: Irony?

T3's cost what they do because of Service Level Agreements (SLA). There is alot of protection built into delivering a T3. At the customer prem there is 1+1 protection on the DS3 card, the timing, Comm/Management cards, Hi Speed optical cards, most are on upsr fiber rings and there is a duplication of all of this at every point that the DS3 is "switched". Along with all that redundancy the SLA assures 99.999 up time with guarantees on service restoration time. It is not cheap to deploy and maintain this stuff.

Fiber has SLAs too and I've gotten cheaper quotes for fiber around here than a T3. Also, the nice thing from the telco's perspective about an SLA is that you can break it and still make a crapload of money. Depending on the provider this happens all the time, particularly with T1s, which are basically just hyped up DSL connections these days.

Yeah, T1 on copper are transmitted via dsl technology and you are right T1 are almost treated as dial tone these days. As for the cheaper fiber quotes-- most likely they are ethernet based non-redundant service as opposed to protected TDM services that deliver DS3's.

However the Ethernet services are much simpler to implement and still have an SLA.