ISDN PRI Offers Caller ID

Your business office or call center uses lots of telephone minutes each month. You've got a dozen or more phones, perhaps many dozens, all managed by an in-house PBX or Private Branch eXchange telephone system. You want the best price possible on your telecom services, but you also want Caller ID. What you want is ISDN PRI.

Those letters are a mouthful when you say Integrated Services Digital Network Primary Rate Interface. What it boils down to is a digital telephone line for businesses that offers high voice quality, fast call switching, and data services such as Caller ID.

Is ISDN PRI the same as a T1 telephone line? ISDN PRI is actually an improved version of the original T1 digital telephone service. It's still delivered on a T1 line, which makes it a readily available service for most business locations. The difference lies in the way the channels are organized.

A traditional T1 line, which dates to telephone company research in the 1950's, is organized as 24 individual channels. Each channel carries a separate telephone conversation. Since all 24 channels are identical, each one is responsible for transmitting the dialing tones and switching signals along with the digitized voice signal. This is called in-band signaling.

The newer ISDN PRI is also organized as 24 channels on a T1 line. For that reason, it is also called T1 PRI. With PRI, one channel is set aside to handling the signaling for the other 23. That data channel also has the capacity to transmit Caller ID information, something a traditional T1 phone line doesn't have room for. By using out of band or clear channel signaling, call processing is also faster with an ISDN PRI line. That can be important in busy call centers.

So, which should you order? In most cases, ISDN PRI is the telephone service that will most closely meet today's business needs, including telemarketing and customer service contact centers. If you currently are using multiple analog phone lines or a long established T1 service, you might also realize a significant cost savings with new ISDN PRI telephone service.

Does this pique your interest? If so, find out how much you can save by switching to ISDN PRI telephone service.

Phone Power... To The People

Enterprise VoIP and broadband phone service for residential users is busily chipping away at the hundred year old switched telephone industry. But what makes the tried and true approach vulnerable? Prices!

Traditional telephony is set up on a tariff basis that nickels and dimes you for every little thing. First you pay a line cost. Then there's local phone service. Long distance is extra with charges for every minute called. Features such as Caller-ID are add-on extras. They even want to charge you a monthly fee for servicing the wires in your home or building, just in case some crazed rodent decides to have copper for breakfast. Is it no wonder your eyes bug out when your phone bill arrives?

Large corporations caught on to this game a long time ago and have been steadily upgrading their facilities with in-house VoIP telephone handsets and IP PBX phone systems connected to competitive ISDN PRI or SIP Trunking digital service providers. Smaller businesses and home phone users are headed the same direction. Except that they need something much smaller in both scale and price.

Broadband telephone service allows new highly competitive telephone companies to vie for your business even though they don't own the copper telephone wires that are so jealously guarded by the incumbent phone companies. How to they get around that monopoly? They piggyback on the broadband Internet service that just about everyone has these days.

Phone Power is one of these new generation telephone service providers that has something attractive for both home and business users. Residential plans start at $14.95 a month with a special introductory offer of $9.99 a month for 3 months available as of this writing. That low price gives you 500 minutes of long distance per month plus Caller ID, voice mail and other highly desirable features. I counted 26 of them on the list and they're all included in the basic price. Need more minutes? Low cost upgrades are available.

Phone Power's business service is even more intriguing. It's a virtual PBX system that you order by the line. Each line is $39.95 a month. Start with one or two. Add more as your business grows. You get big company features such as an auto attendant (electronic operator) and hunt groups to tie your phones together. Seems like a great way for small businesses, even home based businesses, to get started with a professional grade phone service.

In addition to low cost local and long distance, international calling rates are also very attractive with this service. Have a look at what Phone Power has to offer.

PRI vs POTS Telephone Service

Business telephone systems range in size from single line desk phones through enterprise telephony with hundreds or thousands of handsets. Chances are that your business needs are somewhere in the middle. But where? What is the right service for you?

The most basic and traditional phone service is called POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service. Chances are that you won't see it advertised that way. Instead it will be called business line or dial tone service. What you get is an analog connection to the nearest telephone company Central Office or CO. Any conventional telephone will plug into the RJ11 jack on the wall and give you dial-tone when you lift the handset. You can expand the number of rooms with phones by paralleling twisted pair wiring to other phone jacks. But you still only have one line and, if it is in use, no one else can make or receive calls.

Basic POTS is local phone service. Long distance service is either bundled for a single price or assigned to a competitive long distance carrier that offers lower per-minute rates on separate billing. Caller ID is an add-on service that is multiplexed on the same phone line and displays the caller's phone number and other information on phones with the necessary display, or a separate Caller ID unit. Toll free service can be added to forward incoming calls from a toll-free number to your phone line.

A logical upgrade from POTS is to add a separate identical line service and use a two-line business phone. These are commonly sold in office supply stores and can work well for small offices. Such phones are entry level Key Telephone Systems. What distinguishes a key system is that there are buttons or "keys" on each telephone to select the desired phone line. These buttons flash to indicate the line is ringing with an incoming call or light steadily to show that line is in use. Larger key systems can handle a half-dozen separate phone lines.

Businesses with 6 or more outside lines are likely to switch to a PBX or Private Branch eXchange phone system. Like the name implies, this is a mini telephone company office on your premises. Once giant racks full of equipment, the modern PBX may be just a small box that sits on a shelf in the telephone closet. PBX systems work differently from Key systems. The PBX manages all the phone lines for incoming and outgoing calls. It also interconnects all the telephone handsets so you can dial from phone to phone inside your building without incurring any telephone line charges. When you need to make an outside call, the PBX system will assign you the next available line. You don't really need to know which one it is, they all work the same. Callers can directly dial a number for your phone, called DID, or reach an automated system where they can enter your extension number. The PBX will then ring your phone.

Up till now the phone lines we've been discussing for all of these different telephone systems are individual analog POTS lines. You pay for each one separately and the total cost is generally the cost per line time the number of lines. Once you need 8 to 12 lines or more, it usually makes economic sense to switch to digital trunk rather than use multiple analog lines.

The digital trunk, called a T1 voice line, converts up to 24 separate phone lines into a single digital connection between you and your phone service provider. The most popular variety of T1 service is called T1 PRI or Primary Rate Interface. It is also known as ISDN PRI for Integrated Services Digital Network. The difference between a T1 PRI line and a T1 voice line is that the PRI protocol establishes one channel of the 24 as a switching and data channel. This makes calling faster and allows you to have Caller ID for the other 1-23 channels or 1 to 23 outside phone lines.

If your phone system has grown over the years to a dozen or two dozen analog phone lines, it's time you got a competitive quote for T1 PRI lines service. Connecting PRI to your PBX system usually involves plugging-in a special interface card if your system doesn't already have one. Many new PBX systems come with this connection feature.

T1 PRI is More Than Caller ID

T1 lines are the most popular way to connect PBX telephone systems to the telephone network. T1 PRI service is often preferred because it has the ability to deliver Caller ID information to business phones or caller center operations. But, there are other ways that T1 PRI can provide the most cost effective phone line trunking.

T1 PRI is actually a very specialized telecom service. T1 lines have been used for over 50 years to transport telephone calls, and more recently point to point data, dedicated Internet service, and as connections to private networks. The PRI in T1 PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface. That's an important sounding term that comes from a set of standards known as ISDN or Integrated Services Digital Network. The integrated implies more that one service on the line and that's exactly what you get.

The first T1 telephone lines were organized as 24 channels each with 8 bits of data at a rate of 8 KHz. That's just the right size channel to carry one telephone call. So a T1 voice line can carry 24 simultaneous telephone calls. But since all the bandwidth is used up transporting the digitized phone calls, the dialed number has to be transfered as DTMF, better known as TouchTones, over the same voice channel. Plus, bits had to be "robbed" from the voice channels to transmit the on hook / off hook handset condition. This type of signaling is called "in band." In other words, the T1 voice channels do double duty by carrying both the signaling and voice information.

ISDN PRI cleans this situation up by assigning one complete T1 channel for signaling and the other 23 for voice only. You'll hear this referred to as 23B+D. That's 23 B or bearer channels plus 1 D or delta (sometimes called data) for signaling. This is called "out of band," "common channel," or "clear channel" signaling.

Keeping the signaling away from the voice channels offers some big advantages. First of all, it speeds things up. The D channel sends the dialing information from your PBX system to the phone company switch digitally rather than the analog DTMF string of tones. Call setup is noticeably faster, which is especially important in call center operations.

Since no bits need to be robbed, each B channel is a full 64 Kbps (8 bits times 8 KHz). That extra bandwidth may improve phone call quality almost imperceptibly, but it makes a huge difference for channels used to carry data. The "integrated" part of ISDN means that each channel can be individually assigned to be voice, computer data, or video. On the voice side, you can assign each channel to be inbound, outbound or both. That includes DID or Direct Inward Dialing and DOD or Direct Outward Dialing.

Caller ID is also transmitted via the D channel. There's no room in a conventional T1 voice trunk for extra data, so you must order T1 PRI or ISDN PRI to have Caller ID available for your phone system. T1 PRI and ISDN PRI refer to the same service. ISDN PRI carried on a T1 line makes it T1 PRI.

You'll want T1 PRI / ISDN PRI service if you desire Caller ID, fast call setup, DID on a per-call basis, and the cost savings that comes from being able to choose what each of your 23 available channels is used for. As a standardized service, most PBX phone systems offer a line interface card that supports ISDN PRI for one or more T1 lines.

Our Shop For T1 expert consultants can advice you further and recommend that best voice and data line services for your company that will save you the greatest amount of money. Get an instant online quote and/or a complementary phone consultation now.