T1 for Adsl for remote office?

phoeneous

Our HQ is on the west coast and I'm opening a very small branch office on the east coast that will be connected to our mpls cloud. By very small I mean no more than 2 users in a tiny office. Office will only have 2 workstations, 2 voip phones (with video), and maybe 1 printer. No server. Router will be 1861 with built-in switch and fxs ports. ISP is quoting $780 for the T1 because it doesnt have footprint in the area for mpls connectivity so it will ride on ilec's backbone. They are offering adsl for a third of that price. Just looking for suggestions on which service to get. Thanks.

ptilsen

ADSL, for sure. The cost/benefit does not justify a T1.

It would be cheaper to do some kind of hybrid solution, (eg, ADSL to MPLS and cable doing a site-to-site VPN to the HQ's Internet), than to use a T1.

Everyone

If you have cable available, you could ad some site resiliency for a fraction of the cost of the T1 line.

Get 1 ADSL line, and 1 Business Class Cable, setup fail-over so if you lose connection to 1 ISP, everything gets routed to the other. You could even do Multi-WAN load balancing to improve performance. Then like ptilsen said, site-to-site VPN with the HQ.

I did this for a College once. They had some dorms that were outside of their main campus that they wanted to have internet access for the students living in them available. So we got 1 ADSL line, and 1 cable. Much cheaper than a T1 (faster too), and way cheaper than trying to get a direct line across town to their campus.

martell1000

depends on the adsl speeds available in this area.
"upstream" often is the bottleneck in these connections, specially if they have network drives on a server where they save files etc.

try if maybe some docsis 3.0 provider is available in the area. these connection are amazingly stable and you can book some nice upstream with them...

phoeneous

ptilsen wrote: »

ADSL, for sure. The cost/benefit does not justify a T1.

It would be cheaper to do some kind of hybrid solution, (eg, ADSL to MPLS and cable doing a site-to-site VPN to the HQ's Internet), than to use a T1.

Have you worked with voip and video calls over adsl before?

ptilsen

Yes. I've implemented site-to-site VPNs using DSL and cable that carried DNS, DHCP, RDP, VOIP, and even video conferencing -- all using Sonicwall NSA appliances, which are far less sophisticated than Cisco routers. As long you can get decent lines with fairly consistent latency, there is simply not much reason to go with T1s. I've seen VOIP function acceptably over 3G, so it has to be a pretty bad broadband line to not work.

And honestly, for a two-person office, it would be cheaper to do DSL, cable, and analog phones than the $780 MPLS-connected T1. Also, if you're supporting Internet web users, a single T1 is painful for even two users.

tokhss

it all comes down to latency. I say go SDSL if possbile. Check the latency between offices and make sure its got more than 128k upload. Really depends on how far your office is from the Carrier CO.

You shouldnt have any problems going with DSL as long as the latency is in check, less than 40ms pings between offices will do. just setup a strict QOS policy that **** youtube streaming make sure your RTP sessions stay connected.

The only thing im worried about is video. if you ADSL is 1.5 / 384 then you might have a problem lol but if you can get 786 or more you will be ok with the right codec.

I have personally done voice and video over dsl and it works so long as certain conditions are met. Hell, if you can get cable thats better in regards to speed.. see whats avail in the area, cable provides way more bandwidth than DSL for the same price.

Lizano

Why not just go for an internet DIA T1 rather than an MPLS circuit and do a site to site vpn? You still get the reliability of a T1 over a DSL circuit but at a lower cost than an MPLS circuit. I have seen quotes where internet access circuits are at least half the price of a MPLS circuit.

I do like Everyone's option though, two cheap circuits and a fail over device.

phoeneous

Yeah, it doesnt specifically need to be connected to mpls cloud since only resources those users need will be at hq so I can just do an ipsec tunnel and some statics. I cant justify the cost if its going to be just 1 user 90% of the time.

vinbuck

What you really need to find out regarding latency for DSL is whether the port on the DSLAM/MSAP is going to be fast or interleaved. That has the single biggest impact on latency.

Interleaved injects an artificial delay that includes an error correction mechanism - the delay can range from 8ms to 64ms - it provides more consistent latency for a DSL loop that may have physical issues at the cost of increased overall latency on top of the latency that is inherent in the transport.

Fast mode does not inject an artificial delay and is ideal if the loop is clean (copper is good, good grounding, low attenuation, etc) . As long as the loop length is under 18k feet, the distance from the CO is not a huge factor in a loop that is clean if you are talking about speeds under 6Mbps. Higher speed links tend to do better on shorter loops due to signal attenuation.

You might want to check with the local telco about some different technologies like T-1s over HDSL4 or maybe EFM (Ethernet First Mile) over copper telco pairs. EFM is not as well known but can deliver speeds in the 20 to 30 Mbps (synchronous) range by aggregating several pairs together and is delivered to the customer as Ethernet (it's a type of Metro E). Might also see about a loop bonded DSL Modem. You can achieve several Mbps of upload this way and it will still be much cheaper than legacy T-1.

There are a multitude of options over copper that are cheaper than a traditional T-1 but will give you a little better upload for voice and video.

tokhss

The above is true. If you go DSL route, find out your local loop length .. demand FAST PATH if you have the option.