By Kirk Drake | January 28, 2013

Credit Union Branch Connectivity

T1 Lines for Credit Unions

Ongoing Operations works with hundreds of Credit Unions around the country for both production IT (Cloud) services as well as for Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity Services. In our experience, Credit Union branch connectivity always becomes an issue when trying to include branches in the Credit Union contingency plans. This post provides a quick overview of T1 lines and some of the good and bad.

Capacity

A T1 circuit is a legacy service that probably the most commonly used dedicated service to a business consumer providing 1.5MB of bandwidth. A T1 circuit offers 24 channels that can be configured for data traffic, voice traffic or both and most installations use copper wiring but fiber can be used as well.

History

Originally introduced in 1962 to provide trunk communication between telephone company central offices, it is now used to provide point to point communications between sites, transmission of email and application data, web hosting and Internet connectivity for small to medium sized businesses.

Planning

To determine if a T1 circuit is adequate for you installation you must consider how much traffic you plan to transmit or receive across the circuit. A T1 is adequate for most installation but if you plan to implement a virtual desktop environment, video conferencing or a large VoIP solution this bandwidth may not be sufficient. In a virtual desktop environment, it is recommended that no more than ten users share a T1 connection. While it can support a VoIP installation you will need to ensure that the circuit is provisioned or channelized properly to ensure QoS (Quality of Service) for your voice traffic. Implementations of Citrix or Microsoft’s Terminal Services utilize servers to do the actual processing and pushes screen changes to the user which minimizes the bandwidth requirements but also adds additional levels of complexity to the network.

Our experience has demonstrated that a T1 can be sufficient for most small to medium Credit Union networks but you can experience bottlenecks and traffic congestion as your network grows. Data heavy applications such as document archive systems that retrieve large document images or multiple documents simultaneously can slow down your response time. Extensive database activity, network log-ins and audio/video streaming may also effect response as well.

While there can be no guarantee that you will never experience a service disruption a T1 circuit can be a solid backbone of your network and communications infrastructure. It can be bound with additional T1 circuits to provide additional bandwidth as you grow but long term strategic requirements may force you to look at alternative solutions such as DS3 or Metro-Ethernet.

Single Points of Failure

One of the main challenges with T1 Lines is that they represent single points of failure should your Headquarters be disabled. In many cases, in order to get flexibility, Credit Unions should consider MPLS, so that they can connect to a Hotsite or Warmsite in a Disaster and simply reroute traffic. It is also possible to add full redundancy using wireless, DSL or other technology to make sure you have the reliability you need.

Future

In the future, as Credit Unions move to Secure Community Clouds, the quality and redundancy of communication networks will need to improve. When your data and applications run from a remote location, you will need to make sure you can always get to them.

Do you have questions about the different types of Credit Union Networks? Are you curious about how to plan for your network capacity? If you have these or other questions please fill out this quick form and hopefully we can answer your question!

WANT MORE INFO? Fill out this form: