> 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. _______________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users