Thanks to everyone for my rapid education and confirmation of my prejudices. I'm especially thrilled to have all this new jargon to throw around!
You all lead me to conclude... T1 at 1.5 Mbps is no big deal and hardly competes with Business ADSL 3.0/2.5 service priced at $60 month. Business FIOS looks even better at 15 Mbps both ways for $99/mo. Metro Ethernet would look interesting, providing a 10 Mbps connection, but the $1300/month price is off putting. Way overpriced compared to Business FIOS. Some lines being sold as T1 may really be DSL. If so, I need to find out if the client was talking T1 because they were hoping to use some of it for accessing the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). DSL won't be good for that. Need to check prices carefully because a bunch of individual business lines may cost less than an T1. I see that there are also lots of alternatives out there: - TLS (Transparent LAN Service) useful to interconnect distant offices. - SONET and GigE look to be too high capacity for what I'm doing The one issue I'm still worrying about is the scare about "uptime guarantee." If the client decides to rely heavily on VOIP then the reliability of the service becomes more of an issue. But then, a couple of years ago we lost our business's phones for 3 days after a downtown flood, but never lost the DSL. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
