asterisk users - Jun 2007 - North American voice BRI - Informal survey

Hi, folks:

I remain intrigued by the gap in BRI implementation between North
America and Europe, and I wanted to get feedback from the list members
on the matter. I'm seriously considering making the leap in our office.

In Europe, the idea that an office that does not have enough lines to
justify PRI would use analog lines is perceived as technologically
backwards, and yet that's what happens in offices all over North America
all the time. Finding BRI interfaces for many North American key systems
is difficult.

And all this is in spite of the fact that carriers providing PRI can
also provide BRI. The minimum partial PRI offered here is 10 channels.
What if an office has only 4 lines?

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

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 ;) ).

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.

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.

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

-Stephen-

On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 14:32 -0600, Stephen Bosch wrote:
> Hi, folks:
> 
<Snip>
> Thoughts? Who here has used BRI in North America? And when you did, what
> interface hardware did you use?
> 
> -Stephen-
> 
> ____
I grew up on BRI when the internet first started taking off here.  All
terminated into Ascend Pipeline 50 or 25 routers.  Gave 2 B and dynamic
128Kb/s bandwidth.

With that said, the equipment to provision BRI on a class 5 switch here
is another story.  If the building they are delivering to does not have
the right DLC cards, etc - it is usually chaeper for them to send a DS1
and pull 2 analog channels from it, and that is why you see BRI more
exxpensive.

With fiber being deployed to most buildings (or at least RTs) nowadays,
the line cards do not play a factor since the DLC has to already be
there.  At the telco I worked, it was our philosophy to put in a mux and
split out analog before going BRI.  Equipment was cheaper to maintain,
and provisioners were not burdened with 2 channel isdn.  Now we did sell
a lot of DS1 and DS3 PRIs for modem service, etc....

> 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.

>>>>> "SB" == Stephen Bosch <posting at
vodacomm.ca> writes:
SB> Hi, folks: I remain intrigued by the gap in BRI implementation
SB> between North America and Europe, and I wanted to get feedback
SB> from the list members on the matter. I'm seriously considering
SB> making the leap in our office.

BRI is being phased out in some parts of Europe. Try ordering a new
BRI line from Telia in Sweden...


/Benny

I wonder if this is issue is largely limited to to Canada.  (thus
limiting the market)  In the states I think you can get PRI for around
$250.  Am I right?  In Canada, you have to have about 9 or 10 lines to
justify a PRI.  At $250, the cost and added features could justify PRI
at around 4 lines.  Mind you, that still leaves a whole tonne of systems
at the 4 lines and under mark.  




 

No way.....message rates lines hover at $350, and flat rate's run
$450-$500 or so.

 

 

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List,

just my two cents here on BRI cards for Asterisk - sorry if the
following info was posted before/is redundant.

You will find the following BRI cards for Asterisk. Depending on the
chipset/Asterisk module they will/will not support NT mode, have
different numbers of ports, scale well when cards are combined, offer
PCI/PCIe interfaces, support other protocolls like Q.Sig and so on.

The most commom (here in Europe) would be:

Digium B410 - supports NA BRI
(http://www.digium.com/en/products/hardware/b410p.php)

Sangoma A500
(http://sangoma.com/datasheets/A500BRI)

Junghanns Duo/Quad/OctoBRI
(http://www.junghanns.net/en/produkte.html)

BeroNet BN2S0/BN4S0/BN8S0
(http://www.beronet.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=5&id=26&Itemid=28&lang=en)

Sirrix PCI4S0
(http://www.sirrix.com/content/pages/pci4s0en.htm)

Dialogic/Eicon DIVA boards
(www. dialogic.com)

Other cards: Fritz!Card PCI (http://www.avm.de/en) or their C2/C4 cards,
and basically clones of the cards mentioned above from China (OpenVox
et. al). Basically check for the HFC-S chipset (the icon outline of the
Cologne Cathedral is printed on these chips) on the net.

All of them work with Asterisk, but settings/combinations with server
hardware, analogue cards etc. can be an issue, so the easiest way to use
BRI with Asterisk (for me) is to use a Patton SmartNode.

BR,

Frank

-- 
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