T1 Line Basic Facts
Most of us are familiar with a normal business or residential line from the phone company. A normal phone line like this is delivered on a pair of copper wires that transmit your voice as an analog signal. When you use a normal modem on a line like this, it can transmit data at perhaps 30 kilobits per second (30,000 bits per second).
The phone company moves nearly all voice traffic as digital rather than analog signals. Your analog line is converted to a digital signal by sampling it 8,000 times per second at 8-bit resolution. Nearly all digital data now flows over fiber optic lines, and the phone company uses different designations to talk about the capacity of a fiber optic line.
If your office has a T1 line, it means that the phone company has brought a fiber optic line into your office and a T1 line might also come in on copper. A T1 line can carry 24 digitized voice channels, or it can carry data at a rate of 1.544 megabits per second. If the T1 line is being used for telephone conversations, it plugs into the office's phone system. If it is carrying data it plugs into the network's router.
A T1 line can carry about 192,000 bytes per second, roughly sixty times more data than a normal residential modem. It is also extremely reliable -- much more reliable than an analog modem. Depending on what they are doing, a T1 line can generally handle quite a few people. For general browsing, hundreds of users are easily able to share a T1 line comfortably. If they are all downloading MP3 files or video files simultaneously it would be a problem, but that still is not extremely common.
A T1 line cost depends on who provides it and where it goes. The other end of the T1 line needs to be connected to an ISP, and the total cost is a combination of the fee the phone company charges and the fee the ISP charges. Digital signal 1 is a T-carrier signaling scheme devised by Bell Labs. DS1 is a widely used standard in telecommunications in North America and Japan to transmit voice and data between devices. E1 is used in place of T1 outside of North America and Japan. Technically, DS1 is the transmission protocol used over a physical T1 line; however, the terms "DS1" and "T1" are often used interchangeably.
A DS1 circuit is made up of twenty-four 8-bit channels (also known as timeslots and DS0's), each channel being a 64 kbit/s DS0 multiplexed pseudo-circuit. A DS1 is also a full-duplex circuit, meaning, in theory, the circuit can send 1.544 Mbit/s and receive 1.544 Mbit/s concurrently. A total of 1.536 Mbit/s of bandwidth is achieved by sampling each of the twenty-four 8-bit DS0's 8000 times per second. This sampling is referred to as 8-kHz sampling (See Pulse-code modulation). An additional 8 kbit/s is obtained from the placement of a framing bit, for a total of 1.544 Mbit/s, calculated as follows:
Frame synchronization is necessary to identify the timeslots within each 24-channel frame. Synchronization takes place by allocating a framing, or 193rd, bit. This results in 8 kbit/s of framing data, for each DS1. Because this 8-kbit/s channel is used by the transmitting equipment as overhead, only 1.536 Mbit/s is actually passed on to the user. Two types of framing schemes are Super Frame (SF) and Extended Super Frame (ESF). A Super Frame consists of twelve consecutive 193-bit frames, whereas an Extended Super Frame consists of twenty-four consecutive 193-bit frames of data. Due to the unique bit sequences exchanged, the framing schemes are not compatible with each other. These two types of framing (SF and ESF) use their 8 kbit/s framing channel in different ways.
