The Life and Times of Seattle’s Small Business Systems Consultant. Articles and advice on small business phone systems, phone and internet services, VoIP, and all things technology related.
Selkowitz Technology | Seattle’s small business network and telecom consultant
Highest Rated
-
Click stars to vote (left is low, right is high)
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
Its a common misbelief that all T1s are the same, so go ahead and pick whichever is least expensive. The truth is while any (data) T1 will provide 1.54Mb back to the central office, the rest does vary greatly.
1) Latency/Hops - I recently had a client upgrade to a Speakeasy T1 (not my pick) from DSL to improve VoIP call quality. However when running ping tests we still were often seeing ~100ms pings to 4.2.2.2.
2) Dropped packets - A client was recently complaining of slow RDC performance over their VPN, turns out about 33% of their packets on their Telwest/Eschelon T1 were being dropped!
3) Support - people buy T1s for reliability and performance, so its important that on the rare times it doesn’t work that someone is there is get it back online quickly. Not all 24/7 support is as useful as one would like - just because someone is picking up calls on the weekend doesn’t mean anyone is fixing problems. There’s a big difference in service between a facilities based carrier who controls their own equipment and a T1 provider who resells other’s service.
The quality of a T1 carrier’s network, support, and general policies are greatly variable and will affect your experience. Don’t just pick the cheapest provider, it will makes a difference.
The Author: Kevin Selkowitz
About: Kevin Selkowitz is the founder and lead consultant for Selkowitz Technology, a Seattle-area small business systems consulting company. We focus on the four major technology needs of small businesses - phone systems, phone and internet service, servers/network infrastructure, and business applications.
This entry was posted by Kevin Selkowitz, on Saturday, July 21st, 2007 at 11:18 am and is filed under Phone Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response on the right, or trackback from your own site.
