WAN Technical Background on Service Lines

Below you will find additional technical information on WAN and service lines commonly deployed. Please refer to your telecom company to find out, which service lines they can make available to you.

Analogue Lines

The first option is to use analogue lines, and in this scenario, we usually have an analogue modem like the one you would use to dial up your ISP with. On one side we have the local client connected to a modem, while the other side has a remote client connected to one as well. In between is the telephone company, which furnishes the cable infrastructure to connect both places.
The difference between an analogue modem and a dial-up modem is that an analogue modem does not dial.

Disadvantages of Modems

They are slow. At the moment you can get up to 4 Mbs across an analogue connection
The other disadvantages are of analogue lines are that this piece of copper is not guaranteed. What that means, is that every time there is rain or static or exceptionally dry conditions, there might be problems on this piece of copper line
Telephone companies usually don't guarantee any degree of service across an analogue line.
Some advantages could be that they are cost effective – they are much cheaper than any other communication mechanisms with the exception of possibly using wireless.
Digital Lines (T1, E1, and ADSL Etc.)

Digital Lines - The Preferred Technology

A digital wire can run much faster, because it 's a digital signal that is being transmitted. This essentially means there is no conversion between an analogue signal and a digital. Think of a modem, when you dial up to the Internet you hear the buzzing, crackling and wheezing of the modem while it is converting your digital bits coming out of the PC into analogue sound and sending them across wires - analogue frequencies.
With a digital line (such as DSL) there is no conversion happening, which means it is much faster. What happens on both the local and remote side is that there is a Network Terminating Unit, known as an NTU. An NTU is equivalent to a modem. Its job is to provide an interface, which we can use to connect to our devices. In our WAN application with Q-Prog we are transmitting digital data down this line rather than analogue data. The disadvantage with digital lines are greater costs. Overseas many run T1 and E1 lines, where T1 is 1.5Mbps and E1 is 3.4Mbps.

A commonly used technology is ADSL, which stands for Asynchronous Digital Scriber Line. We get the digital connection between two points, but the Asynchronous Transfer means that the download speed can be anywhere between 8 and 15Mbps. The upload speed is restricted to approx. 256k or 2Mbps (this will depend on your Telecom provider), but it is asynchronous transfer, which means it does not send/receive data at the same speed. Nevertheless, for use with POS systems both speeds are more than sufficient to handle the relatively low amount of data that passes through the line.

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