If you are only connecting your site to the internet, then the distinctions are not as sharp. In general, a business class dsl/cable/fios service will be much less reliable than a dedicated line and when there are issues they will not be corrected anywhere near as quickly. But if you are not hosting servers, and your users are willing to tolerate up to 5 days of downtime a year during business hours, then the cost of the t-1s may drive you away.
MPLS is a shared backbone method for network connections. It is an excellent replacement for a meshed t-1 network when as noted above you want to interconnect many sites relatively cheaply. For a single site internet access, it is merely a cheaper T-1.
So in general, DSL is cheap, but it can be painful. The bandwidth is not garunteed and it is usually much slower outbound than inband. You are also sharing the internet pipe to the covad network with a lot of customers, in a minimally engineered fasion. If you decide to go with DSL, consider getting a second source of broadband, such as a FIOS or Cable connection and connect the two with a dual WAN dsl router like the hotbrick. Even if you need to cut it over manually, it is a good thing on those 5 days a year.
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by: jbristlePosted on 2009-05-01 at 07:37:01ID: 24279831
You may be paying for 15Mbp/s DSL service, but are you getting anything near those speeds?
DSL speeds are somewhat based on distance from the POP site and line conditions. If you have noisy phone lines, or are pushing several miles (cable feet) from the POP, then you may not be getting what your paying for. Also, most DSL service is sold with a contention ratio. The provider makes a guess that only a percentage of users will make heavy use of the bandwidth at a given time.
A bonded T1 will give you the advantage that you are paying for committed bandwidth inbound and outbound vs. what is probably burst with the DSL.
MPLS is basicly a traffic prioritization scheme. MPLS will probably not be very useful unless you have multiple WAN sites that your trying to pass traffic between and you need to prioritize inter site traffic over everything else.
What is your current WAN setup?
Before jumping in and switching your entire WAN design around, you may want to determine how much bandwidth you currently have in use. Depending on what type of router you have, it may either have built in metrics for this, or you can probably setup SNMP monitoring for it with some free tools.
http://www.solarwinds.com/