T1 lines have never been cheap, though back in the day they were prized because at 1.536 Mbit/s each way they were comparatively high capacity. At my first job out of college in 1997 the university had a T1 connected to an AdTran CSU/DSU, adding more T1 lines on and bonding them for additional bandwidth until they upgraded to optical fiber. A friend of mine in the very late 1990s had his own residential T1 (this was when consumer DSL was uncommon and 56K dialup was still frequent) that his employer paid the bill for, reportedly close to a cool grand a month in those days; he would never been able to afford it otherwise. On a cost basis alone (and certainly dollars per megabit) a T1 would have been far from my first choice, but I needed a reliable server-grade connection and I couldn't find any other alternatives at the time, so if I wanted to get my hardware back online from the house I was going to have to pay up and get one. Rather than use the actual telephone company I went with an overlay vendor and was quoted $295 a month on an annual contract for a 16-address netblock plus $199 installation. Now going into my fourth week of downtime, I signed immediately. They called the telco who came out the next week, installed the smartjack (we'll talk about what this is), took over both telephone wire pairs to the house and wired it into the pedestal — conveniently, the local telco pedestal is literally in my backyard. Good thing I'd already moved the house alarm modem to a wireless connection since I could no longer have a landline now. I then ran lines from the smartjack into the server room (thanks to the telephone guys I used to work next to when I was consulting I already had good experience with a punchdown tool), the vendor came out the week after that with the T1 router, and finally Floodgap was back up.
The original idea was to use the T1 until something less expensive came along, but the T1 just plain worked and was always highest priority on service calls, so inertia and inflation eventually turned the $295 a month into $399 and a 12-month contract into 48. Still, it was a tariffed line with a service-level agreement, I had plenty of addresses and my personal bandwidth requirements have always been modest — I don't cloud, I rarely stream and YouTube is worse than television — so I ended up just using the T1 as my personal ISP at the same time and avoiding a second bill. This worked out fine for awhile except, of course, for love. My wife needed her Netflix and her iCloud, and by then the previously intransigent cable provider had been bought by someone else (fiber? hahahaha) who didn't know any of the previous history; they came out and finally pulled an RG-6 cable run five years after the fact, and switched us on. I moved the Wi-Fi to the new cable net and her bandwidth needs were thus met in the manner to which she was accustomed. We joke about the his'n'hers networks: I still had my lab and servers on the T1, and everything else including her devices was on the cable.
Well, it was good we did that because I mentioned in January this year that the vendor (which had changed owners twice over the years) was abruptly getting out of the residential T1 business and I had a month before it was switched off. I may well have been their last customer in the region. So I'd like to publicly thank John who reached out and offered a no-strings VPN arrangement — which I'm routing over the cable — to keep Floodgap online while we consider our housing options in a market as bad as it was good when I first bought the place. We turned the VPN on and the vendor turned the T1 off. They never asked for the router back and the smartjack still sits in the back of the house.
Now it's Memorial Day in the United States and I suppose I'll have to do something about that now superfluous wiring run sometime soon. Before I do, though, let's document the T1 for a generation who may have never seen one ... and figure out something fun to do with the router they left behind other than, you know, routing stuff.
Like every computing story, this one begins with a box.
