clabretro
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Early Vid: Homelab T3
🕑 Added 2026-01-20 04:58:43 +0000 UTCFinally wrapped up the first video of 2026, setting up a real T3 connection down here in the homelab and doing a medium-to-deep-dive of T-Carrier and why it exists in a historical context.
A huge thanks to everyone who left feedback on the early release of the T-Carrier history portion; I tried to incorporate changes but to be honest I'm tired and ready to move on to other videos, so I apologize if I didn't loop in the feedback as well as I could. I'll definitely use it going forward for these more "documentary" style videos.
Anyway we'll see how long I can wait before releasing this one. My prediction is Wednesday.
Comments
Eric
Catching up on my clabretro backlog and just got to this one. It's really delightful to see your excitement for this stuff and I've definitely seen junior network engineers who don't have the same level of curiosity in learning the hows and whys. Re: your comment about your old router configs being a murder mystery except you were the murderer: Don't Worry®! this happens all the time in production networks... Not like it's a substitute for good documentation but it is definitely not helping that Cisco IOS syntax doesn't permit arbitrary annotation and only a handful of things support descriptions. I've been part of a fair number of production incident reviews involving the dead -hand revenge of config snippets that nobody still working on the network still understands.
clabretro
Not sure about those converter units. The repeaters I mentioned would've been internal to the Bell system and along the T1 lines every so often to keep the signal strong.
Thomas Eriksen
You mentioned repeaters, I have one Exline2 ELU and one Exline2-S NTU from ECI Telecom, they seem to convert between E1 and (S)HDSL, but I cannot find any information about these devices other than ebay listings… How do you do research on "nonexistent" devices?
Scott Klein
Can’t wait. I remember when having a T3 connection to your office was a recruiting asset. Hard to even think of something as slow as 45Mb today. I think even LTE is faster.
Jack Beckman
Thanks for all the background info; just seeing the connection without the background would have been much less interesting.
Jonathan Cilley
Love this content! Now you can branch out into the OC/SONNET optical side of this tech next!
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