sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Avaya - Lucent Telephones & Systems pri vs bri or pots

which is better for small businedd with currently 5 pots lines in, could i get a BRI or a PRI and save money ? i have 2 ds1 cards and csu/dsu ,

thanks
Bruce

You can't save money with such a configuration. It doesn't make sense to use T1 if you have less then 12-15 POTS lines. This is my personal opinion.

I have several customers who use a "flex" product from the phone company. Not every carrier sells this, but here is essentially what it does: A single T1 is delivered with both voice and Internet services in a non-channelized way. Bandwidth is allocated dynamically, with voice getting the priority. So when no voice calls are in place, your Internet speed is 1.5M. When five voice calls are in place (64k x 5), your Internet speed drops to 1.2M. Carriers often compress the voice down to 50k or 55k, so consider that when making your data bandwidth calculations.

The voice piece often comes with a bunch of long distance bundled in or may even be offered as flat-rate billing. You can even limit the total number of voice calls so that a minimum amount of Internet bandwidth will always be available.

It's a nice solution for the size of office you're talking about. Send me a PM if you would like a carrier recommendation.

COuld i use BRI as well or id PRI the only way?

Basic Rate ISDN only gives you two channels of voice. So even if you had the technology to make it happen, it would not come close to satisfying your needs.

I know of only one person that has ever used BRI strictly for voice. And that person was me back in my Avaya Lab.

Today, the 8 port modules are probably rare 'cause few, if any, purchased them. However, if you need one, they are cheap from the folks that have them.

The price for the service was not economical, or at least here in Colorado it wasn't.

That module would accommodate 8 lines with a total of 16 trunks, but I doubt that you can find a carrier that provides that service.

All of us who know about ISDN/BRI think it was the miracle that never happened. It just didn't catch on. Of course, if a Carrier had that service, they never advertised it.

You could group some of them together for Video and other data applications, but DSL pretty much took that out of the picture.

Except for a few "legacy" video apps, I think BRI is mostly dead.