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T1 costs so much money and its 1.5mbps. My cable connection is 3mbps. So I am not really sure why it costs so much or where the speed comes from. I know T1 is faster... but why do they say its 1.5mbps when I have 3mbps and its much slower?

No, T1 is slow as dead monkies. I believe it's more to do with the fact T1s normally come in business packages in a "leased-line" type service. I believe they're also dedicated lines, so it doesnt just run through your phone line - they actually install cable. You probably find if you get a T1 line, you're getting a whole host of other services as well. Not 100% sure though. I think upload is also as good as download.

Maybe a T1 is only 1 mbps, but it stays 1 mbps for the whole network so some one else wont get less, not sure though, because the one in my last college was slow.

I think the benefit with T1 is the upload speed, not sure of the details though but I think T1 is better for servers.

T1 Definition


the major difference between your account and a business account is usually the upstream speed.
yours is probably 3mb down / 128k up

usually home accounts are asymmetrical in up and down speeds, however the T1 is probably symmetrical and can be broken up for data and voice etc..

eg: i have 8meg down/ 512k up cable, the only way i can emulate voice over this connection is to use voip hardware, where as in a T1 environment its controlled with the hardware and software.

Cable connections are typially shared (on a geographical basis). You can pay for dedicated ones, but then the price starts jumping up massively. They're also (depending on provider) bought in over copper, or if you have a cable service, fibre. A T1 line would be dedicated to you, with 1.5Mbit full-duplex connection (which is 1.5Mbit UP and DOWN at the same time) across a dedicated circuit. Hence that is where you get the speed from.

Even so, a T1 isn't that impressive (speed-wise) even back in the early 90s when web hosting firms used to boast about having hundreds of servers hanging off the back of them

These days most hosts will go for OCs (fully optical fibre connections), the speeds of which can get insane, usually for local WAN connections; or GigE (think 1000Mbps). The data centre where our servers are hosted for example has 2 OC-12c connections and 3 GigE (all with different networks), that's a LOT of bandwidth

At the end of the day, a dedicated installed always-on leased line (which a T1 is just one type of) will always give a better overall performance than a cable connection. It's just that for most of us, unless you spend all day working on the Internet (from your cable connection) you rarely need it. A few years ago perhaps, I remember the thrill of getting our first leased line installed but ADSL and cable can offer the same for much less, providing you don't want to host a popular server off the back of them.

i remember in the old days of P2P napster, you'd always look for files who's owners had T1 connections because it would be sooo much faster. this was probably because of the speedy up-speed from the computer you were downloading from.