[asterisk-users] ISDN

[Joe Greco]

> On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Steve Totaro wrote:
> > I have done this.  Why BRIs exist in the US is beyond me.  If you can, 
> > don't go with BRI.
> 
> Why didn't BRI catch-on in the US?

Stupidity.

Okay, well, many reasons.

It was targetted as a business service, and the pricing models (at least
locally) didn't offer a reasonable residential offering until ... I'm
thinking almost the mid 1990's (1994-1995).  That's when I first recall
hearing about the availability of residential BRI that didn't charge by
the minute, I think.

The telcos had this huge amount of legacy plant installed, much of which
wasn't particularly great copper.  Good enough for voice.  There was also
lots of CO and remote equipment for which BRI simply wasn't available.  I
fondly remember Ameritech running BRI lines out of MILWWI10, using a bunch
of repeaters, because they didn't have the capabilities (or capacity, can't
recall for sure) at MILWWI45, 

(you know what's interesting, Google Maps knows CLLI codes!)

which resulted in about 11 extra miles on a BRI circuit, and I guess it was
much worse in wire miles.  It's useful to remember that the phone company
expects their equipment to be good for decades, and so there's a huge
amount of resistance to upgrading "just for newfangled data services."

Now, I know that there was this huge "vision" in the '60's and '70's of the
possibility of things like videophones, and ISDN might well have been the
ideal platform for delivering something like that, but the flip side is
that the Carterfone decision resulted in a booming non-Ma-Bell CPE business
and Ma Bell mostly realizing that they were getting shut out of that market.

Now, prior to that point, you had a situation where it was Only The Phone
Guy who would bring CPE to your house and hook it up, you might dare to
move the phone line or jack, but usually not.  This meant that a service
that was more complex to provision would still be relatively easy for Ma
Bell to deploy, since it was just training and equipping their techs that
was important.  The end user would have had no idea what the underlying
technology was.

After that point, though, it would have been really hard to sell a
residential BRI, unless you had equipment capable of automatic
configuration, because it's hard enough for Joe Sixpack to plug in a
POTS line correctly as it is.  Configuring more-complex stuff, especially
in the days before nifty little GUI interfaces (which requires electronic
capabilities not really present until recent years) would have been rough.

Despite all this, there was a renaissance with BRI in the 1990's.  We had
reached a point where the electronics were reasonable.  The Internet did
not yet exist for most people, and modem technology was 9600 or 14.4.  As
corporate networking and the Internet exploded, there was a willingness to
pay premium prices for ISDN gear that would allow relatively inexpensive
BRI circuits to attach at speeds far beyond POTS.

Then we saw that fall apart, as speeds increased to 28.8 and then 56K,
and for most users, that was close enough.  DSL was right on the heels of
that, offering greater-than-ISDN speeds.  ISDN BRI was back to dead status
by about 2000.  You can *see* this in terms of CPE devices that supported
ISDN BRI.

In the meantime, the ILEC's began to truly understand the difference
between switched circuit and packet data services.  Many people had been
using ISDN BRI as a faster and more flexible alternative to 56K DDS 
lines, which tended to tie up switch capacity.  More people were ordering
"second lines," and leaving them connected to local ISP's for hours at a
time, which created trunk, network, and switch capacity challenges for
the ILEC's.  This was devastating to the ILEC's, which typically plan
capital expenditures to be good for many years, but in this case, I have
to assume that the ILEC planners knew that Internet would be provided
over circuits other than their switched POTS/DS0's in the near future,
which would dump capacity requirements back down.  They even got smacked
harder than maybe they expected, as some people gave up land lines
entirely, in favor of cell...

In the meantime, many of the major "data" uses that had been envisioned
for ISDN BRI have been done, better, cheaper, on the Internet.
Videophone?  Easy on a PC with speakers, mic, and an Internet connection,
but hopelessly challenging to someone with a POTS or BRI line.  Private
network interconnection?  VPN over Internet.  Etc.

This has meant that BRI has "evolved" towards a way to deliver telephone
network with no loss, or, rather, most of the envisioned benefits are no
longer likely to be exploited via BRI.  So you don't see many BRI lines,
and it is pretty common for those that you do see to be hooked up to a
PBX, automated call handling system, etc.

Further, telco departments to handle BRI's have suffered mightily.  We had
a problem maybe a year ago where we had suddenly "broken" and were unable
to dial... local?  ld?  I can't remember, but we were getting an operator
intercept for one of them.  A dozen phone calls later, and ten people who
were various degrees of "sure" they knew where to refer me to, I still had
not succeeded in finding the correct department to talk to.  Ironically,
it appears that the complaint I submitted through the automatic system 
MIGHT have been responsible for getting the problem resolved.  Even in
1998, which was probably the height of the ISDN BRI here in the US, an
installer who was installing lines noted that you could count the number
of BRI-qualified installers in the county on a hand, and they were
generally hicap people who simply got the BRI jobs when one came along.

In any case, this is by no means a comprehensive history or analysis of
the situation, but just a description of a variety of factors that have
worked against BRI.

... 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.