Bonded T1 vs. Comcast Business Class

brianstoiber

Solid State Member
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Location
United States
Our office is currently using Cbeyond for our voice and internet. We have 2 bonded T1 circuits. We have been having problems with it for the past 6 months and it is getting out of hand. Customers can't get put through to our phones, calls are constantly dropped, during calls the voice goes out or gets scrambled.

We need to make a change and I don't know where to go. We are currently paying about $1400 a month for Cbeyond's service. We have 14 phones between 16 and 20 computers on the network (wired and wireless) at any times. Would Comcast's Deluxe 100 which is 100/10Mbps be a better choice for us? I guess I can't believe we could get better up and down speeds by paying 1/4 the price. Too good to be true? I have to be missing something here.

In this age of technology, does a T1 line really have any advantages with its slow speeds? Please let me know your thoughts? BTW Comcast in the Chicagoland area is very stable (for home users at least) and I have never had a problem with them.
 
you haven't missed anything.

yes that service does sound better.

of course your phones that are on that line.
are they breaking out of your building as mutiplexed analog on the T1 or are they VOIP phones?

I assume that Cbeyond is just providing an internet connecttion a PBX and the possibility of 24 phones?

What are you going to do about phones after you've gotten rid of the t1?
 
There shouldn't be any issues, just make sure that you can port your numbers between the Telcos.

Also if you have non-geographic numbers, (in the UK this would be free phone numbers and premium rate numbers) make sure that you talk to your provider for those as well and make sure that you understand their procedure and lead times for changing over, (if you can't take your old numbers with you then you'll need to make sure that the non-geographic services are redirected to different numbers)...


by and large... no, changing phone numbers isn't a big deal.
just talk to all your providers first, make sure you understand the exit requirements for your existing supplier, (how much notice do you need to give)
and that you understand what the procedure for taking up service with the new company is. and their lead times. that way you should be able to plan for the old service to stop and the new service to pick up straight away.

Do you have a working from home strategy? the worst case scenario is that you'll be without phone and internet if everything goes wrong!


as for changing the internet lines, just make sure that nothing is tied to your existing service.

for example in the UK many BT Buisiness customers may receive free hosting, -tied to their contract, and free DNS services to point domain names to their address space, (where their address space is actually provided by the ISP.)

By this I mean, where I used to work we have four addresses lets say 1.0.0.1, 1.0.0.2 1.0.0.3 and 1.0.0.4, they were owned by BT, but provided to use so that we had out own tiny /31 subnet. When we left BT, those addresses are still owned by BT.

The place I work now has a large IP block, there is a /22 subnet (1022 addresses).
that's owned by the company I work for, so no matter who the IP is we keep the addresses.



you need to figure out if anything connects directly to your office, and is this by name, (in which case DNS will need to change) -hint reduce the TTL before the big day!
or do things connect by IP address. (in which case managing these things will be harder).

(things connecting to your office night be for...)
VPN clients,
internally hosted mail servers, or web servers or FTP servers etc.


Best advice, just talk to suppliers and make a plan.
 
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