What is a T1?
 

When I'm looking for songs and such on LimeWire I always see people who have connections like T1 or T3 or higher. What kind of connections are these? Are they faster then DSL or cable or are they the exact opposite?

T1 should be higher and Ts higher again, but use common sense with T3 as if it claims to have a huge number of sourses it is probably bogus. ....an attempt by various organisations to bugger the network up.

In practice I usually get perfectly good results with Cable/Dsl, and often with Modem ...either they are very quick modems or have been misslabeled

T1 is generally slower than cable, sometimes slower than dsl, but always more reliable. The difference is upload bandwidth.

Common Download Speeds:
T1: exactly 1.54 Mb
Cable: 1.5 Mb - 5 Mb
DSL: 256 Kb - 6 Mb
T3: exactly 44.736 Mb

Common Upload Speeds:
T1: exactly 1.54 Mb
Cable: 128 Kb - 1 Mb
DSL: 128 Kb - 768 Kb
T3: exactly 44.736 Mb

These are only in my opinion. Exact speeds are dictated by one's ISP. Note that it is possible for t3 to be offered at a lower bandwidth, but 44.736 is it's specified rate. Pretty much only businesses or schools have t1, and bigger businesses/schools have t3.

Generally but not always is the case for T3. Some members of this forum use T3 connections.
Re: LW these are the speeds specified:
1. What speeds are T1/T3, etc. for LW, 2. More on LW connection speeds

Re: T1, T2 and T3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DS1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDN

... or to make it short: T1 is made up of twenty 64kbit/s channels and T2/T3 are made up of multiple T1 channels. ISDN with its two 64kbit/s channels is also related to T1!

Re: DSL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Subscriber_Line

The abbreviation DSL describes a large set of technologies and the numbers above are common for ADSL (Asymmetric DSL). Howsoever, the following DSL technologies are also quite often in use:

SDSL (Symmetric DSL)
VHDSL (Very high bit-rate DSL)

... and ADSL2/ADSL2+...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADSL2

...in Japan with up to 50MBit/s