[asterisk-users] North American voice BRI - Informal survey

[Joe Greco]

> Voice BRI is scarcely advertised. In these parts, Telus does indeed
> offer it. (I had to know what I was looking for, though.)

BRI is a service the telcos would like to forget about here in the US.
We ordered it at the house because we're sufficiently near a radio
station that we tend to get POTS interference, and I wanted the
flexibility to do virtually anything with the lines, including X2
dialup inbound (remember X2?  ;-) ).  That was around the peak of the
BRI craze here in the US.

> I did some inquiries about monthly fees.
> 
> Here's what I was quoted for 2B+D voice service (all these prices are in
> Canadian dollars; 1 USD buys 1.05 CAD):
> 
> 1 Year Contract   $91.75
> 3 Years Contract $82.50
> 5 Years Contract $79.85
> 
> They are not keen on month-to-month, but I squeezed a price out of them.
> It was something like $110 a month (it was not in the formal quote ;) ).

We're at something around $50 on M2M, but there was a fairly steep install
(maybe $250?).  It ends up being around $115/mo for the 2 BRI lines (4
channels total).

> The calling features are packaged as one (for both channels). You can't
> mix and match. If I only want caller ID, I'm stuck with everything else,
> too.
> 
> 1 Year contract   $27.90
> 3 Years contract $27.30
> 5 Years contract $25.75
> 
> I think the month-to-month for this was $29.90.

Ick.

Around here, SBC/Ameritech/AT&T prefers you to order by package code.
You can order a-la-carte but it is damn expensive.

The package we selected included Caller-ID.  Cheaper packages were also
available, but did not include Caller-ID, or only included 1B, or only
data service, or whatever.

> So, say we take a 1 year contract, with calling features:
> 
> $119.65, before taxes (we'll ignore the installation fees for the sake
> of this analysis).
> 
> Now, comparing this with our current arrangement for two lines, forward
> on busy on one and caller ID on both, it comes to $114.17 before taxes.
> If one were to go head with the 1 year contract, it's hardly worth the
> difference to do analog.

Right, but you also have to ask yourself, "do I like to punish myself?"

Do you want to be on the wrong end of the support equation when the line
fails?  You can't just call SBC repair.  They'll say that you don't have
SBC service.  You then have to make sure you keep track of the ISDN group's
number, and call them, and be prepared to wait an hour a shot to talk to
someone.

Do you want to be stuck with a service where you can't just plug in a
normal test set to check for dialtone?

Do you want to have to figure out what combination of service adapters
is needed to make it all work?

Do you want to deal with oddities and irregularities in how the service
works and interfaces to your PBX?

These are just *some* of the questions that pop to mind.

You *do* get a gorgeous crisp clean signal like nothing you've ever heard
before.  But it is a lot of work.

> Thoughts? Who here has used BRI in North America? And when you did, what
> interface hardware did you use?

Well, at the time, there was pretty much nothing that was considered to be
"reliably" supported by Asterisk for NA BRI.

I picked up an Adtran Atlas 550 with a 4BRI-U interface and an octal FXS,
and I use the unit's built-in T1 network port to connect to an Asterisk
box.  This works nicely, except for the things for which it doesn't work
nicely.  The box is fundamentally being used as a BRI<->PRI translator, 
but gives me some neat extras.  The BRI ports can be configured to work 
as user or network, so I've got some of my legacy ISDN devices (Courier 
I-Modem, and some other various stuff) that I can have switched through
the Asterisk box and have them work  - all digital signal path :-)

The Adtran, however, has some limitations.  The nastiest has to do with
the way it handles DN's.  It always grabs the first DN on a BRI for the
outbound caller-ID.  Adtran says no plans to fix.  There are also problems
getting it to register correctly to handle more than one call per DN; I
have had it working in the past, but now it is pretty reliably broken.
It's really too damn bad because the Adtran seems to have so many nice
capabilities.

We don't use special calling features (aside from Caller-ID, which I do
not really consider to be a "calling feature") so no idea about any of
the other stuff like 3way, etc.  We do that on the Asterisk box.

I wouldn't buy the Adtran solution again.  It cost about $2500 total to
get up and running, IIRC, with used eBay equipment, but the idea behind
it is extremely attractive.

... 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
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.