-=> Quoting mark lewis to Paul Williams <=-

 PW>>> My guess is it's either a firewall or something to go between a
 PW>>>highspeed line like a T1 or frac-T1 and a router/hub but dunno
 PW>>>for sure.
 JH>>Whuzzat?
 
 PW>  Basically it would be something that goes between the main
 PW> phone system lines and your ethernet setup. T1 and Frac-T1
 PW> (fractional-t1) is something like having 1000 phonelines all
 PW> in a single group. Lots and lots of data carrying capacity,
 PW> like a major business (t1) or a large library (frac-t1) might
 PW> use for inet access.

 ml> a T1 line can handle, at most, 24 56k connections... so, if you are an
 ml> ISP and you want to be able to allow 50 people to be connected all at
 ml> one time, then you will need /three/ T1 lines... this is the local
 ml> loop for local callers to access your connection point... 
 ml> i've never really gotten a good measure of how many can be handled on
 ml> a T1 backbone feed to the internet... mainly because the traffic is
 ml> not "solid"... 
 ml> no matter what, though, a T1 is a lot of capacity but nothing like the
 ml> OC-3, ATM and larger stuff that's out there now days... heck, a T3 is
 ml> like 24 T1s, IIRC, and by today's standards, its a
"little" pipe... 

T-1 is 1.54 Mbps. Slower than ARCnet. T-3 is 45 Mbps. About half of
100 Mbit ethernet.

ISDN is (usually) 2B+D (2 64k B channels plus a 16k D channel for
control and communication)

T-1 is 24B+D.

But if run "raw" you can get rather better than 24 connections.

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