T1s’ Expiration Date

As you likely know, T1 circuits were invented in the 1960s. Now, almost a half century later, the time has finally come to say goodbye, farewell and thanks for the help. Why? Because it’s all about speed. The bandwidth provided by these legacy TDM circuits just can’t cut it anymore, unable to meet the ever-growing needs of today’s bandwidth-hungry applications. In order to support the demands of their business customers, service providers around the world have realized they need to quickly replace legacy T1 and E1 services with new solutions that are ready for 21st century end users. With this being said, the economy – and this is just plain good business sense – begs the question for any service provider to ask: Do we need to start from scratch or can we use our existing infrastructure to meet the needs of this millennium? The answer to this question is, yes, with Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) over copper technology. This emerging technology is now in mass deployment globally, because today’s EFM-over-copper solutions address the need for increased broadband rates, and at extremely affordable prices.

The rationale is not that T1s (or E1s) are bad. In fact, far from it; they have been a robust solution for the past 50 years. However, 1.5mbps, once considered “blazing speed” for even large enterprises, is hardly meeting the needs of SMBs or branch offices today. Without question, T1s are robust and reliable, but the label on them states “must use on or before you rely on the Internet to run your business.” For businesses that count on their network for daily operations (e.g. file sharing, cloud computing, telepresence and VoIP), the need for additional bandwidth is undeniable. A similar argument can be applied to companies providing telecom services. They rely on TDM circuits for backhauling traffic from the central office, from their mobile base stations, from DSLAMs or between PBX sites. There were issues like clock synchronization and reliability that prevented earlier migration to other solutions.

As a solution to meet 21st century requirements of savvy end-users and businesses, EFM over copper is proving to be ideal, with the potential for increased reliability while enabling the required features and additional bandwidth for new voice, data and multimedia applications. To accomplish this, innovative developers are combining Ethernet components with innovative algorithms to deliver maximum bandwidth while ensuring reliability. These algorithms can manage the interference caused by crosstalk and other sources of network outages, providing the ability to surpass T1s and E1s in performance and reliability. At the same time, these solutions are dramatically more economical to deploy and manage than the alternatives, thereby offering the quickest return on a carrier’s investment.

To sum up, while a T1 delivers just more than 1.5mbps per line (using two pairs of copper), the IEEE EFM over copper standard allows 5.7mbps per pair. Recent advancements in EFM over copper can now exceed this, providing up to 15mbps per pair or 30mbps for two pairs. This amounts to a 20X performance boost when compared to those over utilized and just plain tired T1 circuits.

With T1s expiration date now upon us, it is not surprising that we see the delivery of supercharged bandwidth over existing copper morphing the march to deliver Ethernet over copper into a stampede. I will save the economic arguments, more revenue for the carriers, lower operational costs and better value to the end customers, for a later time.

Eric Vallone, vice president of marketing at Actelis Networks, is responsible for setting the direction of the company’s product portfolio, as well introducing its products to the market. Prior to Actelis, he was with AT&T, ADTRAN, and Paradyne Networks. His areas of focus included DSLAMs, mobile backhaul, xDSL, VoIP and VoATM products, and network management solutions.