This will explain some of the
Telecom Terms
that are commonly used.
POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service, is a term which describes the voice-grade telephone service that remains the basic form of residential and small business service connection to the telephone network in most parts of the world.
DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) is a technology for bringing high- bandwith information to homes and small businesses over ordinary copper telephone lines. xDSL refers to different variations of DSL, such as ADSL, HDSL, and RADSL. Assuming your home or small business is close enough to a telephone company central office that offers DSL service, you may be able to receive data at rates up to 6.1 megabits (millions of bits) per second (of a theoretical 8.448 megabits per second), enabling continuous transmission of motion video, audio, and even 3-D effects. More typically, individual connections will provide from 1.544 Mbps to 512 Kbps downstream and about 128 Kbps upstream.
VoIP (voice over IP) is an IP telephony term for a set of facilities used to manage the delivery of voice information over the Internet.VoIP involves sending voice information in digital form in discrete packets rather than by using the traditional circuit-committed protocols of the public switched telephone network (PSTN). A major advantage of VoIP and Internet telephony is that it avoids the tolls charged by ordinary telephone service.
T1 or DS-1 - This is the equivalent of 24 phone lines. A T1 handle 1.5 million bits per second [1.5Mbps]. The key word is BITS not bytes. Bits are much smaller than bytes - and they have a vary compare to a byte. A bit is One - A byte can be 4,8,10,12,16 depending on the thing we are talking about - The telecommunications industry uses bits - so we do to.. Please never confuse the two. From a PC standpoint 8 bits equal one byte.
T2 or DS-2 - This is the equivalent of 4 T1's. The capacity is 6.3
million bits per second [6.3Mbps]
T3 or DS-3 - This is the equivalent of 28 T1's. The capacity is 45 million bits per second [45Mbps]
T4 or DS-4 - This is the equivalnet of 6 T3's. The capacity is 274 million bits per second [274Mbps]. Sprint currently uses DS-4 for the backbone.
OC-1 - Sometimes called SONET. OC-1 uses ATM switches [as all OC-X does] and runs at 51 million bits per second [51Mbps]. Uses Fiber
OC-3 - This is the equivalent of 155 million bits per second [155Mbps]. MCI currently runs a few of these on their backbone.
OC-12 - 600 million bits per second [600 Mbps]
OC-48 - 2.4 gigabits per second [2.4 Gbps]
Frame Relay - Basically dead and gone as far the Internet is concerned. Especially with the bandwidth requirements the way they are. Frame relay runs around 64kbps to 1.5Mbps [64,000 bits per second to 1.5 million bits per second]. Frame Relay is shared line with other people and your bandwidth depends on the current utilization of the line.
ATM - Asynchronus Transfer Mode. ATM is a very expensive switching solution that is used in carry OC-3 and OC-12 lines.
