By convention, all of these newsletters are from “Jim and Steve,” even though the astute observer who knows one or both of us can usually pretty readily identify who actually wrote each newsletter. However, I, Steve, readily identify myself as the author of these next two newsletters.
As our long-time readers know, we have a strong feeling (to put it mildly) that we need a strong sense of where we came from in this industry to have any feeling for where we’re going. And this is especially true for the past 30 or so years as our world has transformed from one where data rides over a voice infrastructure to one where voice fits into the cracks of a data infrastructure.
A major – if not THE major – inflection point in this transition came with the availability in the U.S. of “T-1” services to the enterprise. (E-1 is/was the equivalent service in many other countries.) The “big deal” about T-1 services was that companies were able to buy a point-to-point data circuit that carried 1.544Mpbs of data. And that was a LOT of data in the early and mid 1980s.
But perhaps even more than the size and availability of the service itself was that it was an enabling technology for companies to build and optimize the voice and data networks in such a way that they were not constrained by the individual service offerings at the time. Rather, they could optimize the use of this bulk bandwidth to whatever they saw as a “best” fit.
For instance, a staple of the time was the on-premises PBX. And in order to tie corporate locations together without paying toll charges, an analog “tie line” could be provisioned between the two sites.
The equipment used with these T-1 services brought two major innovative advantages. First, multiple T-1 lines could be used so that a mesh network could be implementing, including automatic rerouting in the case of a failed link. Secondly, the analog lines between PBXs could be replaced with much less expensive digital circuits on T-1 lines. In fact, the typical time for paying for the equipment by reducing fixed recurring monthly expenses was typically three months and almost never more than six months.
But how did an enterprise typically go about making this transition? That’s a topic for the next newsletter.
