Why A Commercial T1 Line Can Help Lower Your Overhead
You should consider a business T1 line if your business could benefit from a highly reliable phone and Internet service that very well may decrease your overall telecom costs. If your business has at least seven individual phone lines and your employees use the Internet, your business is a good candidate to reduce expenses with a business T1 line.
What Exactly is a T1 Line?
A T1 line is a dedicated line that carries digital data between your location and your phone company's customer office. It has a bandwidth of 1.544 Mbps that you can think of as being divided into 24 channels.
When a business T1 line is dedicated to phone service, it can process 24 simultaneous external phone calls. Each call is carried on a separate "channel" or segment of the data stream. Your T1 line and your internal phone lines connect to a PBX device that is your private branch exchange--like your own phone company. The PBX allows internal calling with a 3 or 4 digit extension, provides functions like voice mail, call waiting, hunt groups, music on hold, and other functions. Your PBX also handles 24 external calls simultaneously. For many businesses this handles the external calling needs of a hundred or more employees.
An alternate version of T1 is T1 PRI which is often found in customer service centers where customer reps review customer records with your customers. With T1 PRI, there are 23 voice channels and a data channel that would be attached to a server. When a customer calls, the caller ID information is passed to the server which pulls up and displays the customer record on the computer screen of the customer rep as they are answering the incoming call.
Your business T1 line can be devoted to Internet access. You can plug the T1 line into a card in your LAN server to provide a bandwidth of 1.544 Mbps to the Internet. This bandwidth is equal to 30 to 60 dialup connections (depending on the dialup line quality). Because the T1 line is digital, there will be no degradation caused by crosstalk or line noise.
Alternately, your T1 line may integrate both phone and Internet services. You would devote a certain number of "channels" to phone service and the rest to the Internet. An additional card in the PBX streams the Internet data to an interface card in your LAN server. This is a popular option for lots of small and medium sized businesses.
How Can You Reduce Expenses With a Business T1 Line?
Think about a business that desires to exchange their existing individual phone lines and their Internet service provider with a T1 line. The most important reduction in costs is due to the elimination of the monthly expenses for the individual phone lines as well as your Internet access expenses.
Your ongoing expenses will include a monthly lease expense for the T1 line and phone charges which come packaged with the T1 line. The cost to you for a T1 line principally depends on the distance between your business and the phone company's customer office. In addition, there will be one time charges for the PBX device and other interface devices and cabling that your particular physical layout requires. There will also be continuing maintenance fees associated with the PBX and other devices.
Lots of small and medium businesses have discovered a T1 line to be an excellent means to cut down on costs as well as provide higher quality and reliability to their customers and employees. You should get a business T1 line quote to determine if this is the right choice for your business.