No subject

delivery of the signal, and route the signal around internally digitally,
if you have ISDN.  This means, for example, that our USR Courier I-Modem,
which can terminate a 56K call *digitally*, results in my being able to
make a 56K connection from most modern cities here in the US, without
wasting an ILEC ISDN BRI line dedicated to that purpose, by having the 
PBX connect an extension to the I-Modem.  I just dial into a general
purpose number, and dial the appropriate extension, and voila, I'm on our
network at "high speed."

This is clearly obvious to you, but I thought I'd expand for the others
who might be reading along and didn't understand the implications of all-
digital.

> >IF you can get a PRI-line for the same price.
>
> Not to mention that the interfaces for PRI are about five times as =
> expensive.  I'm not sure why.  It doesn't seem like it ought to take a =
> lot of electronics to break down the bit stream.

It may not take a lot of electronics.  However, the sad truth of it all is
that any electronic device produced at low volume tends to be expensive to
produce.  This is largely the result of costs such as retooling, and in
most cases the significantly higher cost of small-run integrated circuits.

For example, a PC board manufacturing house (I'll use the following shop,
no affiliation, as an example, because they have transparent pricing)
http://www.expresspcb.com/ExpressPCBHtm/Specs4LayerStandard.htm
http://www.expresspcb.com/ExpressPCBHtm/Specs4LayerProduction.htm
for a 30 sq in board.  To produce 10 boards would cost $404, or $40/board.
To produce 50 boards would cost $1109, or $22/board.  To produce 1000 
boards would cost $15516, or $15/board.  Even 1000 isn't really a large
run, though.  You're paying premium board rates for small runs, because
the shop has to stop and retool for your run.  I haven't bothered to get
a large-run quote, but I bet you can get that down to well under $10/board
if you're ordering a hundred thousand at a time...

You then have to add on assembly costs, which are typically higher than
the PCB costs.  It could very easily end up costing $50/board *just* for
PCB and assembly, no parts included, for runs in the hundreds of cards
range. 

The problem with telephony stuff, especially in this market, will be that
the demand for a T1(/PRI/etc) interface is going to be very low.  You would
need to be a relatively big shop to be able to buy by the thousand, as even
at one bulk buy per year, that translates to several cards departing 
inventory daily.

I expect that some of the ISDN BRI interfaces are dirt cheap because they're
popular over in Europe.  I've been told that in many places, they're sold in
lieu of a modem.  Once you are moving product in high volumes, the pricing
tends to come down.

It stinks, yes.

... 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.