In some cases, if you can't get B8ZS line coding, and have to use AMI, you might have to drop to 24x56=1344kbps (and use one bit on each DS0 to maintin 1's density), but even then, if your routers or DSUs can invert the data, you can still go 24x64=1536kbps. (HDLC guarantees zero-density ... so if you invert it, you get guaranteed 1's density.)
Yep. I've done that since 1988 on old circuits that were delivered before B8ZS was available. It does work. However you still can not get 1.536 over a T1 in general, close but not quite. Cisco framing as well as PPP framing uses HDLC encoding. The rules for HDLC encoding say that any time there are 5 one bits in a row within the data portion of a frame, a zero bit is inserted by the transmitter and removed by the receiver. This adds to the overhead of the T1 link. It is of course possible to send data that never has 5 one bits in a row, but real data will have this. The 5 ones don't have to be only within a byte. The contiguous one bits can cross byte boundries to incur this ones stuffing algorithm overhead. Walt