Mark Coccimiglio wrote:
Hey all, It such a shame that BRI technology is such a flop in the USA. For a small office such as mine it would be a great product. So her goes my question.... What is a known asterisk working BRI card that will operate in the USA. I need to weigh price/quality. I need to do DID/DDI (or what ever you want to call it). Asterisk will do everything else I need. The ILEC has at the other end a DMS-100. I have been having all kinds of problems using POTS lines that I will consider it an investment to move to a more digital connection. I am considering going the VoIP route (Vonage, Broadvoice, etc...) but before I commit either way I'm exploring all my options.
In the US, bri & pri's are less popular for lots of reasons, part of which is the cost of implementing the necessary software on the CO switch. Siemens (as one example only) charges their small CO customers $7,000 to implement the software (plus an annual fee), even if the CO has only one potential customer. Not very cost effective in the small CO's.
Also, once an management/engineering decision has been made to support bri & pri's in a CO, the telco sales/marketing folks come up with a monthly customer cost for providing the service, and frequently those prices are waaaaaay out of sight. The monthly cost will vary dramatically from one telco operating company to another, depending on what the sales/marketing folks included in their cost analysis.
On top of all that, when Northern Telecomm first introduced the DMS series of switches, the line cards necessary to support bri's were different from those needed for pots service. The price of those cards were high compared to pots cards, therefore not many CO's were equipped to handle bri's.
As a result of those items above, deployment has basically been limited to the larger CO's in the US, and then primarily to pri's.
I don't know of any underlying influencing factors that would suggest the above is going to change any time soon. Since the bri's are the least likely to be supported (from a general overall perspective), the number of vendors selling bri interface cards in the US is rather small when compared to other countries.
Since the number of implementations (in the US) is rather small, the expertise needed to support it is almost non-existent except in the larger CO's. I don't think I'd be looking to implement bri's any time in the near future.
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