Point to Point T1

I had a subscriber who really wanted a connection, but they were 6 miles up a winding, heavily wooded valley. There was no way that I could reach them with wireless.

So we looked into getting a point to point T1 from the local phone company. Here's what was involved:

• Booked the T1 install with SBC. Installation charge was $46, then $280 month for 3 year contract. Endpoints are 6 miles apart but on the same CO.
• Bought a couple of wanADAPT-1T1E1LP PCI T1 adapters from the very helpful folks at SBE. $560 each.
• Found a couple of (Pentium 166) machines from the junk pile to be the T1 endpoints, installed FreeBSD 4.7 on them and applied the wanADAPT-1T1E1LP GPL drivers. Cost: $0.
• Put cards in each machine. T1 connections use an RJ-48 connector, which is exactly like RJ-45 but with different wiring. The upshot is that you can make your own cables for a few cents, just like you do for 100Base-T. The SBE documentation tells you how to make a crossover cable, so that's what I did first.
• After the machines were able to ping over the crossover cable, I plugged them (straight-through cables this time) into the RJ-48 sockets at each end of the T1. Hey presto, they connected, and have been happily shipping 1.5Mbps back and forth ever since.

More notes are here.

James Bowman - acelere.net