[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk BRI in the USA

[Rusty Dekema]

On 4/11/06, Rich Adamson <radamson at routers.com> 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