[asterisk-users] Why PRI not BRI ?

[Gordon Henderson]

On Sun, 29 May 2011, virendra bhati wrote:

> Hi List,
>
> I have stupid question but I want to know it. Why we use the PRI insted of
> BRI ? Just for the sake of number of lines or any thing else ?

It probably depends on your country.

In mainland europe (or maybe just Germany), ISDN2e (BRI) is very popular - 
not uncommon in home installations too.

In the UK, it's almost the standard in small businesses - the migration 
path seems to be from a single line to 3 lines sharing the same number to 
ISDN2e...

There was a push in the UK to support BRI in the home (~10 years back, 
under the name Home Highway), but it came at a time when ADSL was almost 
upon us, and BT in their infinite wisdom removed a lot of the ISDN 
features that make it actually useful...

I don't think BRI ever caught on in the US - It was analogue or PRI (or 
channelised/fractional T1 or whatever it's called) Probably made it much 
easier for the telcos to support (and afford)

> And why SIP is used for making calls rather then IAX? Even we know IAX takes
> 1 channel for making calls?

SIP is an open standard that's been around since the late 90's. IAX, which 
is also open and free was only just accepted as a standard last year, but 
even so, there's inertia. Very few phone manufacturers are using it - why 
should they, when they've been using SIP for years, and the same PBX that 
works with IAX also works with SIP... (And does any other PBX support IAX 
yet?)

Gordon