A: Most of our customers find a regular Point to Point T1 best fills their needs for a medium to large office network. If your office is close to common infrastructure or fiber optic plant installs, such as is the case in many metro or urban areas, a Point to Point T1 can provide the best speed and reliability of any WAN connection. However in some cases, a Fractional T1 can be a good solution for a smaller office that may need a full T1 in the future.

Fractional can often use the same infrastructure and equipment as a Frame Relay or Point to Point T1 so changing from one service to the other is very easy and can have almost zero cost.

Q: What If My Fractional T1 Goes Down?

A: The most common cause for a T1 to go down is either a power outage or line disruption. Check first that your T1 router and CSU are powered up and not showing errors. Many routers can tell you about the status of the T1 line and any problems it is experiencing. Check the cabling for the T1 line to make sure it has not been damaged or disturbed. Make sure all connections are tight.

If the customer premises equipment is working fine, please call Fibernet Technical Support for help. We can check the connection from our end and determine if the line provider (Qwest, ELI, XO, etc.) needs to start a repair ticket.

If the line provider opens a repair ticket they will expedite the repair as much as possible and since you pay them for the leased line service, they may also issue a credit for the downtime if you ask for it. If Fibernet is handling the call to the line provider, you will need to get the repair ticket number for the line provider from us in order to get a credit from the line provider.

If Fibernet is experiencing an outage due to maintenance we will have endeavored to notify you in advance. If you were not notified it is most likely because you are not signed up on our notification list. Please login to our customer back room at http://www.fiber.net and subscribe to the notification list for your service account type.

If Fibernet is experiencing an unscheduled outage due to a network issue, we will follow up with you once service is restored or once we have an ETA for repairs to be completed.

Q: What If My Fractional T1 Seems Slow?

A: The first thing you should check is your traffic graph in the customer back room at http://www.fiber.net. It will show you your current 5 minute average transfer. If it is unusually high, that can indicate possible virus or malware activity on your network or a user abusing your connection (downloading movies etc.).

If your usage seems depressed on the graph, this can still be caused by virus activity but it can be of a type that is hard to see from outside the network. We can come to your office and perform a network traffic scan to determine the nature of the traffic that is causing problems. Just call our sales and service office to arrange this service.

It is possible that your line is experiencing transient errors or packet loss due to CRC errors on the line. This can be seen in the router interface for your end of the connection. We can determine this for you if you provide us authentication access to your router. This is usually fixed by opening a repair ticket with the line provider.

It may be time to add more channels to your available T1 channel pool to increase your available bandwidth. Call our sales and service office to help determine if this is the case.

Extreme Support