said by Hydraglass:Don't forget that the T1 line was introduced in 1961 with all of its 1.544 Mbps of digital glory - It wasn't until the 1970s that higher-level T-carriers (first the T2 at 6.3Mbps, then later the T3 at 44.7mbps) came along - then there was quite a bit of stagnation until the late 1980s when fiber started to become commonplace, and technology like SONET came along. Communication speeds seem to have gone in fits and starts, unlike computing technology that seems to follow a pretty stable growth curve the last 40 years.
My CEGEP (two/three year level college between highschool and university), for the entire 3 years I was there, relied on a bonded T1 (DS1C?) for a whopping 3 megabits of connectivity to serve classrooms, all computer labs, all residences, the school website, and online registration system. When I started out it was running on copper and shared with McGill's mcdonald campus. When I graduated, it had been upgraded to dedicated fiber, but still running just a bonded T1 (so about 3 megabit) over that fiber.
It was painfully, almost uselessly slow, and this was before YouTube... At one point I knew how much they were paying for it (I've since forgotten), and the price made no sense, for what they were paying I remember they could have gotten dedicated ethernet-speed fiber that would have been many times faster. Then again, they were operating the school's systems off a mainframe (yes, an actual mainframe) in a basement server room with a halon fire suppression system, and a bunch of developers that kept the source code to stuff on paper in binders. So you could say that even though it was the 2000s, the school's IT department was stuck in the 1970s despite having a budget big enough to fully modernize. No idea why.
EDIT: Oh yeah, and when we did pre-registration with the compsci dean, since professional degree people got to do that, the school's registration system, and this was like 2004, it was all a text-based terminal system.