Telco lingo have you confused? Don’t know a PRI from a SIP trunk? This quick article will help set a few things straight.
Carrier Services: Many customers today have analog lines or Voice T1s interfacing to their traditional phone systems to access the PSTN (Public Switch Telephone Network) for Local and Long Distance calling. The market is rapidly moving to Integrated PRIs and SIP Trunks that offer Voice and Internet services over a single T1. These types of service offerings are also a form of VoIP.
Dynamic PRIs – Voice and Internet: Service providers install T1/s at the customer premise and terminate those T1/s with a Cisco or Adtran router. The router has two interfaces on it: An Ethernet interface that connects to the customer’s Internet firewall and the other a PRI interface that connects to the customer’s phone system. The outgoing digital phone traffic via the PRI interface is converted into an IP packet by the router and tagged to have greater priority than the outgoing IP data packets. The provider runs QoS (Quality of Service) on the T1/s so the tagged voice packets take precedence over the untagged data packets thus insuring voice quality. The bandwidth is dynamically allocated by the router and gives data more or less bandwidth depending on how much voice traffic there is on the circuit/s. These offerings are very commonplace and are very cost effective for customers.
SIP Trunks – The Next Generation: The next generation of access to the PSTN is called SIP (Session Initiated Protocol) Trunking. It operates similar to the Integrated PRIs but the interface to the phone system is IP not PRI. This allows the voice transmissions/packets coming from IP PBXs to stay IP all the way to the provider’s network and eliminates the cost of a PRI module for the IP PBX phone system. Some of these offerings include unlimited local and long distance calling in the US and Canada.
Summary: The telecom world is quickly moving to IP Transports and IP Phone Systems. The market is also rapidly coalescing around Premise Based IP PBXs because they offer the most reliability and best call quality while providing advanced functionality to customers that improve internal operations, increase employee productivity and enhance customer service.
About ROI Telephony: ROI Telephony – www.roitelephony.com – is a six year old Dallas based company specializing in helping businesses transition from traditional phone systems to current, state-of-the-art IP PBX technology. To Contact ROI call Tom McCrary, 972-498-1352.
Tags: Adtran Router, Analog Lines, Bandwidth, Carrier Services, Cisco Router, Digital Phone Systems, Dynamic PRIs, Integrated PRIs, IP PBX Phone system, IP PBXs, ip phone systems, IP Transports, Long Distance, Phone Systems, Primary Rate Interface, Public Switch Telephone Network, Quality of Service, Session Initiated Protocol, SIP, SIP Trunks, Unlimited Local and Long Distance Calling, Voice Over Internet Protocal, Voice T1s, VoIP
