Bundled T1s help providers beat last-mile crunch

The Internet has truly become a global communications and commerce infrastructure that is a competitive necessity for business. Its growth and success have also created a bandwidth juggernaut that is bearing down on the last mile, threatening to choke access to this critical resource. The main arter...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Telecommunications 1999-12, Vol.33 (12), p.36
Main Author: Palmer, Dan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Application service providers
Bandwidths
Bundling
Carriers
Communications networks
Copper
Efficiency
Frame relay
High speed
Infrastructure
Internet access
School districts
Virtual private networks
Wireless networks
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Summary:The Internet has truly become a global communications and commerce infrastructure that is a competitive necessity for business. Its growth and success have also created a bandwidth juggernaut that is bearing down on the last mile, threatening to choke access to this critical resource. The main artery to the Internet for many businesses is the copper T1 telephone circuit that transports up to 1.5 Mbps of symmetrical data. Increasing numbers of business, education and government users are finding that T1s are no longer adequate to meet their exploding access bandwidth requirements. Last-mile T3 fiber can certainly satiate the bandwidth juggernaut with up to 28 times the capacity of T1, but it is generally unavailable and can be expensive to install and provision. An effective way to achieve the objectives and bridge the bandwidth gap between T1 and T3 is to bundle multiple copper T1 lines to form a last-mile, virtual multimegabit access path. This path would have the high throughput and low latency of a single high-speed circuit and bandwidth equivalent to the aggregated copper lines. A solution that employs ubiquitous copper-based T1s is attractive because the price of T1s continues to fall, they provide guaranteed secure and symmetrical performance, and are well understood from an installation and maintenance perspective.
ISSN:1534-956X