Why a T1 Internet Provider Is Good for Your Business

It really wasn't all that long ago that the thought of having a T1 internet connection for your business was seen as something of a luxury, usually pushed by the IT department if you were a large enough organization but with no clear benefit to your business. Many companies are still content with phones and faxes to conduct business, but increasingly people are recognizing the value of investing in services from a T1 internet provider. With this service in use, businesses are able to access email and internet services from multiple machines at blistering speeds compared to many home connections, but how does this benefit you?
How a T1 line works
The easiest way to illustrate how a T1 internet line can be an improvement is to compare it to the normal phone line that a business might use, or that many people have at home. A phone line is made up of a pair of copper wires that can then send your voice, or transmit data at around 30 kilobit a second. This does sound fast, but consider that the average digital photo these days can easily be up to one hundred times larger than that in size. Suddenly this puts into perspective how some websites can take forever to download if they are covered in pictures.
A T1 internet provider replaces that old phone line with a fiber optic line which can carry either twenty-four voice channels or data transmitted at 1.544 megabits per second - or 1,569.792 kilobits per second to compare it to your old land line. The line can either be plugged into your phone system to offer 24 phone numbers, or plugged into a router to offer the basis of company-wide internet access that can be used by many people all at once instead of needing an individual phone line for each person. With a bit of thought and preparation you can even split the use of the T1 internet line to offer both voice and data to people in your business.
Isn't that expensive?
It's true that there's a relatively hefty price tag up front to set up a service from a T1 internet provider but the savings come from the running costs. Instead of paying a variable cost for calls you are paying a fixed rental, making it easier to budget. The real savings though come when you start to use the service for voice and data. You are already saving money on calls between people by having less physical phone lines to manage but then there's the time and money saved by using the data connections. File transfers - whether its designs and documents from contractors and partners, or transactions with banks or other organizations are suddenly completed much quicker using the T1 internet. This saves you in call charges (compared to the price of faxing or sending over smaller modem connections) and frees your staff and systems up to be more productive than watching over to check that the connections have worked in the first place.
How reliable is it?
In a word: very. A residential connection will usually be competing with other users in the area for its speed of connection. A T1 connection operates at a guaranteed speed and can easily be increased in capacity and speed without needing to buy in any additional fiber optic line. Instead of paying for a higher rate of data from your T1 internet provider and replacing some of the routers that effectively act as traffic lights for the information entering and leaving your business.
Learn about what T1 internet, is and how it can benefit your business. You can save a lot of time and money by investing in this type of service.


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Romney Merged Law and Business at Harvard

One of the most exclusive clubs in academe is a Harvard University dual-degree program allowing graduate students to attend its law and business schools simultaneously, cramming five years of education into four. On average, about 12 people per year have completed the program — the overachievers of the overachievers — including a striking number of big names in finance, industry, law and government.

The program is so small that it has drawn little attention outside rarefied circles, but that may change as its most famous graduate, Mitt Romney, campaigns for the White House, subjecting every phase of his life to scrutiny.

When Harvard started its so-called J.D.-M.B.A. program in 1969, there were just a handful like it. Others have cropped up since, but Harvard’s has what may be the most successful alumni roster, particularly in finance.

In addition to Mr. Romney, founder of Bain Capital, the roughly 500 graduates include Bruce Wasserstein, who led the investment bank Lazard until he died in 2009; leaders of multibillion-dollar hedge fund and private equity firms like Canyon Capital Advisors, Silver Lake Partners and Crestview Partners; high-ranking executives at banks like Citigroup and Credit Suisse; C. James Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company; and Theodore V. Wells Jr., one of the nation’s top trial lawyers.

The young Mr. Romney wanted to go to business school, while his father, George W. Romney, a cabinet secretary and former Michigan governor, urged him to go to law school. So the younger Mr. Romney did both, studying at Harvard from 1971 to 1975.

“What was special about these people was that they had bandwidth,” said Malcolm S. Salter, an emeritus business professor who helped create the program. “They had to be driven, hard-working and organized to a degree that was unusual even for Harvard business or law grad students.”

Guhan Subramanian, who graduated from the program in 1998 and now is its faculty chairman, said the students could be viewed as “résumé builders who haven’t figured out what to do with their lives and are just checking off all the boxes.” But he said they are genuinely interested in mastering both fields.

Students must be admitted separately to the business and law schools before applying for the program. That is a feat in itself, because the two student bodies are quite different.

The law school takes younger students, often straight out of college, putting more emphasis on academic credentials, while the business school usually wants work and leadership experience. Business students are often described as being more gregarious and at ease with numbers, law students as more intellectual and facile with words.

And then there are politics.

“I was among the most conservative people at the law school and one of the most liberal people at the business school,” said Peter Halasz, a partner at the law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel, who completed the program in the early 1980s. “Studying at both exposes you to many different kinds of people and various sides of an argument.”

The political gap was wider in Mr. Romney’s era, scarred by Vietnam and Watergate, when law students wore T-shirts and business students wore ties to class. “The law school was very swept up in the politics of the time, but the business school pretty much ignored them,” said Detlev Vagts, a law professor who ran the program for more than 30 years.

Charles E. Haldeman Jr., former head of Putnam Investments and Freddie Mac, was a year ahead of Mr. Romney in the program. “Back then, people were trying to save the world,” Mr. Haldeman said. “Because I was interested in business, and doing well economically mattered to me, and I didn’t think the country was controlled by evil people, the law school students did think of me as a little different.”

Both schools were overwhelmingly male in those days, and Mr. Vagts, said it took several years before the dual-degree program had its first female student.

Far more graduates have gone into business than law; many, like Mr. Wasserstein, switch to business.

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