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Backbone Bandwidth Comparison
It is easy to get lost in the jargon of high-bandwidth connectivity. This comparison should serve to assist you in evaluating the effective capacity of a data center or hosting arrangement.
A T1 or DS1 is the equivalent of 24 voice grade telephone lines whereas a T3 or DS3 line represents a bandwidth equal to about 672 telephone
lines, which is wide enough to transmit full motion, real-time video, or high-bandwidth database transactions over a busy network.
For whatever reason, unlike the units that we see in downloaded file transfers, the telco and bandwidth vendors typically use bits instead of bytes for their rate units. At the risk of stating the obvious, a byte is 8 bits, so divide megabits by 8 to get the megabytes. So this makes a DS3 equivalent to 5.4 megabytes per second (MBps as opposed to Mbps) and an OC12 clocks in at just under 20 MBps at maximum capacity.
The chart below shows a comparison of transfer rate capacity for the different kinds of network lines that are
currently available.
| | | 20 | 40 | 60 | 80 | 100 | 120 | 140 | 160 | 180 | 200 | 220
| ----
| ----
| ----
| ---->
| 620
| mbps
|
| DS1 |
| |
1.5 |
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| DS3 |
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43 |
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| OC3 |
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155 |
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| OC12 |
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622 |
- DS1 - 1.544 megabits per second (24 DS0 lines)
- DS3 - 43.232 megabits per second (28 T1s)
- OC3 - 155 megabits per second (100 T1s)
- OC12 - 622 megabits per second (4 OC3s)
- OC48 - 2.5 gigabits per seconds (4 OC12s)
- OC192 - 9.6 gigabits per second (4 OC48s)
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