I know there are strong feelings about this, but hear me out.

I do IT support on a freelance basis for an organization in Washington DC, and they've asked me to look into alternatives for internet connections. They currently pay $850 for a T1 line that's supposedly rated at 3Mbps, and they feel their experience is just too slow.

Here is their setup:

-the building is a satellite campus for a university
-the building contains 4 offices, a computer classroom, a computer lab, two video production machines that regularly upload large files, and five floors of apartments with about 20 jacks per floor
-the network is essentially split, with one side going to the apartments and the other going to everything else, but both share the T1 line

My question is essentially: why is a T1 so great? Also, I've been trying to read up, and everything I've seen simply rates a T1 at 1.5Mbps. So why is the representative from their ISP giving me options for 5 and 10 Mbps, and telling me we already have 3 Mbps?

As far as I've been able to find, the benefits of a T1 line are reliability and a strong SLA with the ISP. However, this particular institution is getting to the point where a 99% uptime with something like FIOS would be acceptable as long as they could start seeing the speed they want.

I'm a little new to the "enterprise" side of things such as this (not that I consider this organization to have "enterprise" level needs), so I'd appreciate any info you folks could offer. Thanks.