[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk BRI in the USA

[Rich Adamson]

Mark Coccimiglio wrote:
> Hey all,
>    It such a shame that BRI technology is such a flop in the USA.  For a
> small office such as mine it would be a great product.  So her goes my
> question....  What is a known asterisk working BRI card that will
> operate in the USA.  I need to weigh price/quality.  I need to do
> DID/DDI (or what ever you want to call it).  Asterisk will do everything
> else I need.  The ILEC has at the other end a DMS-100.  I have been
> having all kinds of problems using POTS lines that I will consider it an
> investment to move to a more digital connection.   I am considering
> going the VoIP route (Vonage, Broadvoice, etc...) but before I commit
> either way I'm exploring all my options.

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.