[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk BRI in the USA

[Joe Greco]

> 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.

It's still similar.  Out here, we get a lot of RF interference, and it
turns out that BRI is actually cheaper than equivalent POTS lines with
Caller-ID (a feature I require), and you can do neat stuff like having
56K dial-in with a USR I-Modem.

However, CPE has always been very limited here in the States, and there
was no good way to hook up direct to Asterisk.  I've heard a few stories
that reported partial success with an Eicon Diva Server card, but always
with the caveat that "it doesn't work quite right" or something along
those lines.

CPE like the USR I-Modem won't deliver Caller-ID to the POTS port.  Other
CPE like the Motorola BitSurfr Pro is sensitive to RF noise.  We were
using Netgear RT338's for a number of years, but they are all burnt out
now and impossible to replace (actually most CPE is virtually
irreplaceable, as so few mfr's make ISDN gear anymore).  And while most
CPE was OK with our old POTS based phone system, almost none of it worked
reliably with POTS<->VOIP gateways, such as the Sipura SPA-3000.

Further, BRI has two channels, and the U interface pretty much dictates
that you feed both of them to the same place.  Putting them into an
Asterisk box, I would lose the ability to use the USR I-Modem, for
example...

Despairing, I thought I might have to abandon the beautiful digital
delivery of ISDN, which is stupid when you have a digital (VoIP) phone
system.

But:

After talking with a friend up in Minneapolis, I bought an Adtran Atlas
550 off of eBay, which is a versatile Swiss Army Knife for telecom needs.
With a quad port ISDN BRI and an octal FXS, it's the killer CPE device,
but the best part is that it also does T1/PRI, so you can /convert/ BRI
to PRI, etc.

I've not actually done that just yet, though I do have a Digium T1 card
around here somewhere and want to try it out one of these days.

So, I can't actually say it /works/, but it's supposed to.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
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