The Telephone Company: Giving more than just a “voice” to customers

May 14, 2010 - By Jason Hamilton

For most people, hearing the words “telephone company” brings a relatively drab image to mind of your typical phone line in your home and a crusty lineman climbing the aged and weathered telephone pole in your back yard. Many people may even think of the DSL line connected to their home computer and hope the phone company is doing something to keep their “technology” up-to-date. But what most people don’t know is that the local telephone company or ILEC (Independent Local Exchange Carrier) is much more than DSL service or the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) to which they’re accustomed. Your ILEC is indeed at the forefront of existing and emerging communication technologies that you may or may not know about.

Does it work now? How 'bout now?

As a typical consumer, much of what the phone company provides to you in the way of services is transparent or may never apply to you. For people starting or growing a business, these services may be invaluable to your success. The purpose of this article is to equip residential and business consumers with enough knowledge to at least understand the basics of telecommunications technology. For those who work in the IT field, you may learn about something that can facilitate your company’s growth and help meet the growing demand for more data and faster connectivity.

POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) or DS0 is your basic telephone line. ILECs were built on POTS/DS0 lines. When a POTS/DS0 is not being used for voice, it can transmit data at 64Kb/s. As the years passed and technology improved, calling features became available like Call Forwarding, Caller ID, Call Waiting, and Voice Mail to name few. POTS/DS0 lines have been used for years by FAX machines and modems, as well as voice.

ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) services are a means of providing a dedicated connection for use with video conferencing, data, and voice. Basic Rate ISDN still exists in speeds of 128 Kb/s. An ISDN doesn’t sound very fast but it provides an always-on connection and your IP address is never periodically renewed. With Basic Rate ISDN you have 128 Kb/s upstream and downstream. Primary Rate ISDN makes use of a T1 line (we’ll discuss this later) to provide the customer with 1.54 Mb/s connection. Again, you get the same connection speed upstream and downstream. If money is no real issue for you, multiple Primary Rate or Basic Rate ISDN lines can be bundled together to meet your data consumption needs. And with the use of repeaters, ISDN lines have no limitation on the customer’s distance from the ILEC’s equipment.

ADSL (Asymetrical Digital Subscriber Line), or DSL for short. DSL service provides a very fast download speed to your computer while providing a relatively slow upload to the network. That’s why it’s Asymetrical. For example, if you subscribe to a 12 Mb/s ADSL service, you will be able to download data to your computer at speeds up to 12 Mb/s. But you will only be able to upload data at speeds up to 1.3 Mb/s. These speeds are determinate on your distance from the ILEC’s equipment and the size of the cable carrying the signals to your establishment. ADSL service has a distance limitation to it allowing a customer to be only two miles from the company equipment; up to five miles in rare cases. ADSL comes in varying speeds and flavors, and some markets and carriers provide speeds up to 24 Mb/s.

This is what your ADSL is doing.

T-1’s, or T-carriers have been around longer than ISDN lines and carry a heftier price tag with them than Basic Rate ISDN or ADSL. The basic unit of a T-carrier is a POTS/DS0 line. 24 DS0 lines form a T1 which provides a dedicated connection of 1.54 Mb/s or 24 POTS/DS0 lines. T1 lines can be apportioned to supply any variety of needs. The customer can have it setup so that 12 channels are for data, and 12 channels are for voice; or any combination thereof.

Some T-carriers are called T-3’s. A T-3 is comprised of 28 T-1’s. That’s 672 POTS/DS0 lines, or a data speed of 44.73 Mb/s. T-3’s are quite expensive, but provide data speeds more than adequate for handling a wide variety of video, data and voice applications.

Optical Carriers, are just that: carriers being transported over fiber optic lines and transmission systems. Some of the most commonly known Optical Carriers are OC-3, OC-12, and OC-48. What these denominations are saying is that an OC-3 is carrying three T-3’s, and an OC-12 is carrying twelve T-3’s, and so on (I’ll let you do the math on how many POTS/DS0 lines that is). Optical Carrier systems can be setup for point to point or ring applications. If a company has multiple locations spanning over a city, county, state, or country, ring applications are usually the way to go.

Each little fiber carries its own OC carrier.

Metro Ethernet is a relatively new deployment of services offered by ILECs. Ethernet is capable of some blazing fast data speeds, but it’s limited in distance. Metro Ethernet removes the distance limitation and can cover a large metropolitan area with data speeds in the gigabit range. The Metro Ethernet hubs, routers, and switches are connected via fiber optic lines and bring Ethernet to the MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) (pun intended). Metro Ethernet is commonly used by education and government entities. But the technology can even be used by an Internet Service Provider to bring another option of connectivity to their customers.

Other services provided by your ILEC may surprise you. Some phone companies provide infrastructure services to customers. 911 Call Centers and the FAA use the infrastructure of copper and fiber optic cables on a daily basis to run their critical operations. Local municipalities use copper and toll equipment for traffic lights. Railroad companies rely on an ILEC’s systems for monitoring the integrity of the rail system. Police departments and cab companies lease radio circuits so their building on the edge of town remains connected to the radio tower at their downtown offices to ensure communications with their sky scraper offices.

Different ILECs and different markets provide a slew of different services and technologies. What has been covered here are just a few examples of what your ILEC can do for you. Data speeds, capabilities, and pricing vary based on markets and providers. For more information, contact the sales or business office of your local telephone company.