On 4/11/06, Rich Adamson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > In the US, bri & pri's are less popular for lots of reasons, part of > which is the cost of implementing the necessary software on the CO > switch. Siemens (as one example only) charges their small CO customers > $7,000 to implement the software (plus an annual fee), even if the CO > has only one potential customer. Not very cost effective in the small CO's. > > Also, once an management/engineering decision has been made to support > bri & pri's in a CO, the telco sales/marketing folks come up with a > monthly customer cost for providing the service, and frequently those > prices are waaaaaay out of sight. The monthly cost will vary > dramatically from one telco operating company to another, depending on > what the sales/marketing folks included in their cost analysis. > > On top of all that, when Northern Telecomm first introduced the DMS > series of switches, the line cards necessary to support bri's were > different from those needed for pots service. The price of those cards > were high compared to pots cards, therefore not many CO's were equipped > to handle bri's. > > As a result of those items above, deployment has basically been limited > to the larger CO's in the US, and then primarily to pri's. > > I don't know of any underlying influencing factors that would suggest > the above is going to change any time soon. Since the bri's are the > least likely to be supported (from a general overall perspective), the > number of vendors selling bri interface cards in the US is rather small > when compared to other countries. > > Since the number of implementations (in the US) is rather small, the > expertise needed to support it is almost non-existent except in the > larger CO's. I don't think I'd be looking to implement bri's any time in > the near future.
I dunno if it's THAT bad. I had a BRI line in the (relatively) podunk town of Kalamazoo, Michigan back in 1998. Sure, it took the phone company a couple of weeks to provision the service, but it takes the phone company a couple of weeks to do most anything in my experience. The price was something like $45/mo for two channels and the same per-call/per-minute pricing scheme as POTS (no per-minute fee for incoming and local calls, regular LD pricing for LD, and 800 local outgoing calls included after which it was something like 6 cents per call). The switch on ILEC's end was a DMS-100 implementing National ISDN-1. I really put the ISDN line through its paces too -- voice, data, bonded data, automatic bonding and de-bonding to allow for voice calls -- and everything always worked flawlessly. I don't know what today's pricing is like for ISDN BRI what with all of the various mergers (at the time, I had service from Ameritech), but unless it has gone up significantly, BRI seems like the perfect type of trunk for an Asterisk system too small for a T1/PRI to be an affordable option. -Rusty _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
