Internet Speed Chart – Cable, DSL, T1, T3, FIOS, etc.
It seems people still have a notion that “dedicated T’s are the pinnacle of data telecom service. Why buy a dedicated T1, T3, etc. when alternative technologies are reaching/surpassing their performance for a fraction of the cost?
| T1 | T2 | Cable/DSL | Verizon FIOS | T3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Download Speed Can Reach (kb/s) | 1,544 | 6,312 | 8,000 | 30,000 | 44,736 |
| Download Speed Can Reach (kB/s) | 193 | 789 | 1,000 | 5,592 | 3,750 |
Note 1: Cable/DSL speeds are listed at somewhat of a maximum of what people are seeing today.
Note 2: Upload speeds for businesses that are hosting technology can be an important consideration, and Cable/DSL providers typically limit the uploads speeds significantly. Verizon’s FIOS, on the other hand, starts with 2,000 kb/s and goes up to 5,000 kb/s for upload — still quite a bit faster than a T1.
If you want 99.99% or more guaranteed uptime through a SLA (Service Level Agreement) and a guaranteed 1544kb/s Up and 1544kb/s Down 24/7, then a T1,T2, or T3 connection are what you need. If you are ok with a few hours of outages, no decent SLA (ask Verizon for an SLA), a shared connection where if your neighbors use all the bandwidth (or through DDoS) then you start to have slow connections, Disabled ports, or to shutoff your service if spam or other issue detected.. without trying hard to contact you.
Businesses that provide SLA with uptimes, 24/7, and guarantees cannot rely on Cable/DSL or Verizon FiOS. Especially for 30$ – 130$ connections.
For Home/Personal.. or a business that does not ’serve/host other businesses’ and just uses email and web.. then I suggest FIOS!
Also, an idea, I do suggest a 24/7 business have 2 connections to every server they have. 1 will be the tried and true T1 line (or T2) and the other will be the unreliable (at least not 99.999%), but extremely fast, FIOS. When FIOS has its outages, then your server will still be able to communicate through the trusty T1 line. However, this will only work with Name-Based failover/redundancy and not IP addresses (useful for websites, ftp sites, and even Oracle database connections by hostname and not IP address).
-Kevin
Comment by necron2600 — January 11, 2008 @ 7:34 pm
I’ve shared you article on digg, well done
Comment by gry planszowe — April 10, 2010 @ 3:47 pm