Oh, yes!  I remember the copper T1’s eventually traveled over a single pair using ADSL at high voltage.  In our metropolitan area, the copper plant had loading coils everywhere—undocumented.  If your copper T1 had the misfortune of having a loading coil somewhere in its path then your circuit was doomed.   Plus, these little Pairgain’s would literally explode inside the manholes.  Copper and T1s should have been outlawed.  Especially, since using fiber for everything but the last foot (TLF, lol) was far more reliable.  

I do hope that the archivists view the delivery mechanisms like the T1, POTS, and so on as having historical significance and are inextricably linked to UNIX.  Talking to anyone that worked on the Bell System (and later telcos) always reveal great stories. Many are worthy of preservation.  

Incidentally, I had a similar issue with a staffer needing remote access.  There were no viable wired solutions.  However, surprisingly, 4G MIFI with an unlimited data plan actually was a stable solution—-and she even received a dedicated IP.  


Bill Corcoran


On Dec 7, 2017, at 9:04 AM, Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

T1 wasn't cheap nor ubiquitous.    I ran the networking for the degree granting public colleges in NJ (which on the whole is a fairly metropolitan area) but there were places we couldn't get it.
It was also expensive.   Old school copper T1 required repeaters every quarter mile or so.     Debugging could be fun.   At least our telco (NJ Bell) back then could move the loop back around while I did tests to tell them where the line was failing.

And yeah, I live in one of those backwaters now.   No cable, no fiber optic anything.    I use two DSL lines to get an aggregate 20M down 1.5M up.   That's the best the vesiges of the old GTE telco down here can do.
ATT has fiber in communities down the road but we're too sparse to attract their interest.    Comcast won't even pull in a local drop from the main road.