RockchuckQwest Silver 1.5Premium
join:2010-05-26
Boulder, CO | reply to EMTPtoPA
1. Cbeyond:
Press Cbeyond get out of the contract NOW. Once installation starts, that's that. Refer to Cbeyond's ratings on this site. This set of reviews »www.yelp.com/biz/cbeyond-atlanta-2 speaks for itself.
2. Diversity:
DS1 (T1), as has been stated, is an assured service...it's always 1.536/1.536Mbps, rain or shine. DSL and cable are "best effort" services, both in terms of throughput and reliability. It's advisable to install both DSL and cable (and the T1, if you're stuck with it), and run them into a link aggregator:
»www.peplink.com/solutions/intern···lancing/
If one service drops, the other(s) will carry on, providing slower but still usable internet. Anticipating your question: No, the speeds of the individual services will not add -- the aggregated services will only be as fast as the fastest individual service.
Note that simply buying two DSLs and a T1 will not accomplish diversity...it all arrives on the same telco cable. Seeing the local power company backhoe your 100-pr. buried cable is a heart-stopper, I can tell you.
3. Legal:
Be very sure to read the fine print (Acceptable Use Policy) covering each broadband service. Many ISPs, if not most, forbid resale; furnishing the service as an amenity may be permitted, but you don't know until you peer at the 8-point type, single-spaced pages of verbiage. |
RockchuckQwest Silver 1.5Premium
join:2010-05-26
Boulder, CO
1 edit | I realize that the bulleted descriptions I wrote could be inferred as an firm endorsement of T1 over DSL. This isn't the case, however, there are salient differences:
> T1 delivers lower speed than today's range of xDSL offerings, but it's constant, bidirectional speed that isn't subject to external influences. Consumer DSL speed varies from day to day - old cable, rodent damaged cable, oversubscription, wet weather, hot weather... T1 forfeits less throughput to overhead than ADSL does: my Qwest/C-Link ADSL's Up to 1.5 label should really be Up to 1.3 On a Good Day.
> If a T1 goes down, the serving telco attends to it immediately, as specified by contract. Read anywhere else in these forums about how diligently most telcos do or do not respond to subscribers' DSL outages and slowdowns. Again, the descriptive phrase for consumer DSL service is "best effort".
Ironically, these days, most T1 spans are carried ("provisioned") between central offices and subscribers on 2- or 4-wire HDSL. However, these HDSL links are proprietary to the phone company - if there's a failure the telco gets right on it, in my experience, unlike consumer-class xDSL. In contrast, when responding to a complaint made about a flaky consumer ADSL, I've heard a telco field tech say to the subscriber, "We don't make enough money on it to justify spending any time on it [to get it to work properly]." They never say this to a T1 subscriber.
Going back to the OP, the situation is that a signed Cbeyond contract may compel using the dedicated T1, like it or not. If so, I would make the best of a costly misstep by aggregating it with whatever services the company could comfortably afford in addition to the cost of the T1: one or two DSLs and the highest-speed business-class cable offering, to enhance reliability through diversity. When a problem occurs, it's easier to tell the tenants that the connection will be "a little slow" until it's fixed, as opposed to having to confess that their internet will be out entirely for an unknown length of time. Once people get used to a service, free or not, they expect it to be there all the time.
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Reviews:
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to EMTPtoPA
Most of the above post is off base.
We are comparing a 20 mbit/s adsl2 ( or VDSL ) to a T1. The marginal speed fluctuations of a 20 mbit/s line is nowhere even close to T1 speed.
And as you correctly pointed out the vast majority of T1's are carried over xDSL making the comparison even more ridiculous.
T1 SLA's are extremely over rated and even more extremely over priced, especially for the OP purpose. |
