[VoIP] Hello from Slovenia!

[Mark Rudholm]

Russ Price wrote:

> Analog phones will be around for a long while here - even whizbang 
> fiber-to-the-home services provide an analog jack for the phones.  A 
> standards war between Lucent and Nortel helped make BRI a spectacular 
> failure in North America; while vendors and providers wasted time and 
> money dithering over a national ISDN standard, dialup modem speeds 
> jumped and eliminated much of the urgency to switch to ISDN.  Then DSL, 
> cable, and fiber came on the scene, driving the final nails into BRI's 
> coffin.  BRI service is barely even available any more, and one might 
> have to dig deep to find someone at the phone company who even knows 
> what the hell it is.

I really wish I could interconnect an American BRI to Asterisk.
It would eliminate all the problems with my analog loop and FXO
port.  Here in California, BRI is relatively affordable at 35$
per month (cheap when you consider that's two B Channels) but
all the hardware interfaces for Asterisk are for EuroISDN.

I tried to point out to Digium that BRI is an obvious solution
for the small business market they're going after, but they
look at BRI penetration rates in the US, which are quite low.
My follow-up point that California is a huge market and that
availability of a BRI interface for Asterisk would probably
drive sales of BRI here fell on deaf ears.

I agree, analog lines/ports are going to be around for a very
long time yet.