The Hilltop Blog

One of the first questions Hilltop asks new clients during an initial onsite assessment is “how fast is your bandwidth, and how much do you pay for it?”  A common answer is “we have a full T1 – isn’t that more than enough?”

A few years ago, our answer would have been yes.  Now that Hilltop is rapidly moving clients to cloud services, the answer is a resounding no.  Cloud services such as Hosted Exchange, Cloud Servers, and Cloud File Storage require much more pipeline than a T1 can provide.  Even if your company does not utilize any cloud services, a small office of five users will easily max out a T1 line as many programs heavily rely on web access.  Have you ever been on YouTube and waited every five seconds for the video to load? That’s because of low bandwidth. 

There are a host of ISP providers with speeds exponentially faster than a T1. Let’s dig into some quick numbers.  A T1 line provides a maximum download speed of 1.5Mb per second.  That means a standard 20MB PDF will take 102 seconds to download.  Let’s compare that with other common ISP options:

Yes.  You read that correctly.  The 4G hotspot from Verizon is over four times as fast as a T1.  And it’s completely mobile.  We certainly don’t recommend moving your office to a 4G connection because of monthly bandwidth caps, but you can see how technology is rapidly moving beyond the T1 connection.

Beyond just the obvious speed improvement you see with alternative ISP options, pricing can also be a huge attraction.  Hilltop works with several ISPs in the Washington, DC area where pricing is often a fraction of the cost of a T1 line.  We’ve configured clients with Comcast connections for under $200/month.  In some cases, we’ve put in 100Mb lines for under $700 per month.  That’s often the same price clients pay for T1 lines.  Let’s take my numbers from above and factor in pricing.  Pay close attention to the last column which calculates the cost per MB when factoring download speed and the cost per month.

So how do T1 providers keep clients?  They often tout their ‘responsiveness’ and ‘reliability.’  I can speak with confidence that after almost ten years of 24x7 monitoring of hundreds of servers, T1 lines are no more reliable than cable or DSL.  Often the frequency of disconnects is based on how good the wiring into your building is, how careful the construction crews are at avoiding cutting lines when digging up sidewalks or how much snow your city gets in the winter.  If any of those points fail, your T1 will go down as frequently as your cable connection.  Beyond reliability, T1 providers love to tout their customer service.  Again, after almost ten years of support, I can tell you the hold times for a T1 representative are just as long as cable or DSL.  I’ve personally seen an ISP take over a month to replace a broken T1 router, resulting in our client being without a T1 connection for weeks.  Thankfully we planned ahead and had a backup Comcast connection installed months earlier.

If you have ever felt like your bandwidth is slow or just want to save money each month, there are hosts of options available.  Everything runs better when you have more bandwidth. As I like to tell clients, if your office operates on a T1 connection, you are getting close to the same bandwidth as my two year old BlackBerry connecting via  a Sprint 3G connection.