How Does a T1 Line Work?

How Does a T1 Line Work?

We are all familiar with the idea that a regular business or residential telephone line comes from the local phone company. Regular phone lines are delivered on a pair of copper wires which send your voice as an analog signal. Using a basic modem on such phone lines can send data at about 30 kilobits per second (30,000 bits per second).

The phone company's job is to send almost all voice traffic as digital instead of analog signals. Your analog line gets converted to a digital signal by sampling it 8,000 times per second at 8-bit resolution. Almost all digital data is now sent over fiber optic lines, with the phone company using various designations to talk about the maximum load of the fiber optic line.

In order for your office to have a T1 phone line, your local phone company would have to bring in a fiber optic line into the office. A T1 data line can hold 24 digitized voice channels, or it can send data at 1.544 megabits per second. To use the T1 line for telephone conversations, it only needs to plug into your office's phone system. However, if the T1 line is for carrying data it would then plug into the network's router.

A T1 data phone line can hold about 192,000 bytes per second, which is approximately 60 times more data than with using a normal residential modem. T1 services are much more reliable than an analog modem and can usually carry several people, depending on what tasks they are doing. For example, if hundreds of people are only surfing the Internet, T1 can easily handle such a large number of users. However, if all 100 people were instantaneously downloading MP3 or video files, which is highly unlikely, than this would cause a strain on a T1 service.

A T1 dedicated phone line can cost between $200 and $1,200 per month depending on which T1 provider you choose and where it goes. The other end of the T1 line must be connected to an Internet Service Provider, so the total cost to have a T1 service includes both the phone company's fees and the ISP's fees.

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Written by:
Laura Rucker
Editor, USaveTelecom.com - © 2008