Is there any reason why a business would still use a T1?

So I’ve encountered this recently, where a customer is interested using an immersive simulation we’ve developed, deployed via a browser… and everything was cool. But then we found out that they have T1 connections at their various sites.

My initial reaction was that I didn’t think T1’s were still a thing that existed.

The bandwidth for a T1 is stupid low, at around 1.5 Mbps… and amazingly, from a cursory search, it looks like they’re also stupid expensive, paying something like $200/mo for this bandwidth.

So I figured I’d ask the hive mind… are there really legitimate reasons to use a T1, rather than all of the more modern solutions to this kind of thing? Or is it just something which is essentially legacy hardware? I figure that there may actually be some real reason for this type of solution, but couldn’t really think of any.

pr0n

and

war3z

Guaranteed uptime is the only thing I can think of. No ‘business’ line at Cox or whatever actually guarantees that.

Does that answer equate to “the year is 1996”?

Ya, this was one of the things I was thinking… although jesus, at some point, even if you’re guaranteed a thimble-full of water every day, you’re still gonna die of thirst.

There’s still folks rocking ISDN out there. Technical inertial. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. What, we’re still paying for that? BOFH needs it for dark web searching on human trafficking. Etc.

The usual.

Ya… the thing that kind of broke my brain was when I realized that the price folks are generally paying for these lines is so expensive.

I suspect the main reason is the amount it costs to upgrade. Yeah, it’s dumb to pay those high prices for ISDN or T1, but in order to get something better you’d have to pay a big chunk fee for installation of a better connection. Probably pays for itself over a few years, but some organizations - especially smaller ones - don’t have that kind of planning horizon for IT.

T1 also carries phonelines, if they’re using an analog telephone exchange in their office, perhaps. No reasonable justification to use one for internet service.

T1 were like mythical devices of power and wonder when we played Quake2. Rumours would abound of mysterious players cleaning up on FFA servers with a sub 20 ping and them being so rich they could afford a T1. There were a few guys on JANET too, and could actually host their own servers.

I attended a university with ethernet and a T3, playing Quakeworld. I ranked top 100 world-wide.

I was an unstoppable daemon of destruction. Nothing and nobody could touch me. Just perfect synchronicity between mind, keyboard, and mouse. Consistently satisfying domination of my fellow man. I really thought I was an amazing player, at the time.

Yeah. I was shocked to learn that a T1 was actually slower than the DSL I had by the time I looked at them.

So what’s the connection, literally or figuratively, between a T1 line and pr0n and war3z?

Asking for a freind.

Back in the time when anyone knew what the heck a T1 line was, many of us were kids pirating videogames. That’s about it, time association.

Pr0n wasn’t coined until well after that time. I think Billy from Voodooextreme was the originator? Or was it a jeffk-ism?

Web video back then was either shit (extreeeemly low Rez and only about 5-6 seconds) or nonexistent. So not really pr0n.

At the time I was downloading pictures, actual motionless JPEGs, from usenet and furiously masturbating with my right hand while hitting the right and left arrows to advance to the next image in ACDsee. Lovely memories of a more innocent time.

Ahh, ACDsee. Should have included a MP3 player for the porno muzak.

Imagine if video porn never took off. Today we’d be all “Alexa, zoom in on her boobies” and “OK google, show me double-penetration with Tera Patrick”.

ah good ol’ alt.binaries

Damn it, @stusser, I just about keeled over from laughing so hard. If I’d been drinking something, it might have killed me.

All about the volume, my friend. If you had the Internet pipes, you could download so much from the warez sites that you’d run out of good shit and end up with actual productivity software. But you wouldn’t stop, because it was important to be “the guy who has everything” on his computer.

Back in college, I was a student manager at the computing center. Position of responsibility and all that. More than once, another of the staff would come to me and say that the traffic monitoring logs showed a huge amount of traffic to shady sites coming from my dorm apartment. One of my roommates was the campus champion of warez downloads and thus I got to be the one to tell him that they were going to block his access. Every time I did, he’d stop for a week or so to get off the shit list, then go right back to it. Ah, the good old days.

This is how I will always picture you from now on.

I love that phrase, “furiously masturbating”. I use it often.

I prefer a more lackadaisical masturbation.