What is ISDN and Why Do I Want It?

You may have heard the term ISDN related to telephone services. So what is it and what can it do for you?

ISDN stands for Integrated Services Digital Network. It's a fancy term for digital telephone service. But not just any digital phone service. This one has very specific standards.

The story behind ISDN goes back to the days when the standard for Internet access was a dial-up modem using an ordinary analog telephone line. ISDN was envisioned as a way for users to have a combination of separate telephone service and Internet service on a single ISDN telephone line with three channels. Two of these are called "B" or bearer channels and are 64 Kbps each. The third is the "D" or delta channel that is used for switching and signaling. One B channel can be used for a telephone handset. The other can be used for a modem. Or both channels can be combined for 128 Kbps Internet service. This arrangement is called ISDN BRI. The BRI means Basic Rate Interface.

The telephone companies expected ISDN BRI to be a hit with consumers as an upgrade to their analog phone service. But by the time it was ready for mass deployment, Internet standards had moved on and everybody really wanted DSL or Cable broadband. After all, 128 Kbps may be impressive when compared to a dial-up modem, but it pales in comparison with always-on broadband at 512 Kbps or higher. Today, even mobile users want bandwidth above 1 Mbps, so ISDN BRI is of little interest to most users.

The exception is in the field of broadcasting and professional audio. ISDN BRI lines can be used to transmit high quality audio through the telephone network by using a CODEC (Coder / Decoder) to convert the audio to and from the ISDN format at each end of the call. Guests around the country can join a panel discussion and sound like they are right in the studio instead of hundreds or thousands of miles away. Voice over artists can contribute to a production from their home studios.

Where ISDN flourishes today is in its second standard, called PRI or Primary Rate Interface. ISDN PRI consists of 24 channels configured as 23 bearer channels plus 1 delta channel. The 23 bearer channels can each support 1 telephone call each. That's 23 digital phone lines, plus the delta channel used for signaling and Caller ID data.

ISDN PRI is the telephone service of choice for medium and large company telephone systems. Most PBX and IP PBX business phone systems offer built-in support for at least one ISDN PRI line. Other systems can be configured for one or more ISDN PRI trunks with a plug-in circuit card.

In addition to office PBX telephone, ISDN PRI is preferred by company contact centers and independent call centers. There is a significant cost reduction realized by using a single ISDN PRI instead of a dozen or more individual analog phone lines. Each channel on the PRI can be configured to be local and/or long distance, incoming and/or outgoing calls. If more than 23 lines are needed, more can be added to the system to double, triple or quadruple the number of active phone lines.

ISDN PRI is delivered on a T1 line in the United States. For this reason, it is sometimes known as T1 PRI or T1 telephone service. In other countries, an E1 line might be used to provide PRI service.

Now that you know what ISDN is good for, can this service help your business or organization to provide high quality voice communications for perhaps less than you are spending now? Find out by checking ISDN PRI service pricing now.

Cut Telecom Line Expenses, Not Lines

In this recessionary business climate, keeping the enterprise afloat may mean throwing every non-critical expense overboard. Soon the obvious fat disappears from the budget and managers start questioning line items once thought sacrosanct. Do you really need 10 phone lines or could everybody get by with 5? Take turns calling if you have to. What about that Internet connection? Do we really need that T1 line when those 56K modems are still boxed up in the back room?

Good grief. Cost cutting can easily go from savvy business practice to organizational nightmare when desperation sets in. It's best to start coming up with reasonable reductions before upper management gets a whiff of blood in the water and goes nuts. Think through the justification for each budgetary line item yourself and make changes you can take credit for, or at least have proposals in your back pocket.

Now here's the good news. If you can keep a cool head at least for a little while, you may be able to get the savings your business needs while maintaining the services you need to be at your most productive. The trick isn't just to slash and burn every telecom expense you come across. It's getting the same functionality for less money. You don't necessarily want to cut your lines, and with them your livelihood. You want to cut the expenses associated with those lines.

Most companies have two types of telecom line services: voice and data. Video, such as video conferencing, can fall into either the voice or data category depending on how it's implemented.

Lets start with voice services. Most businesses of any size have a PBX telephone system that manages their telco connections. There may be some room for cost savings here because of the way the system has grown. It usually starts with a few lines, adding another and another as the company need grows. Pretty soon you've got a dozen or two individual lines. Usage reports say you need them all or customers will start getting poor service and some of your employees will be cooling their heels while waiting to place a call. But you aren't necessarily married to the configuration you have today. By consolidating all those individual phone lines into one or two T1 PRI digital trunks, you'll have the same level of service but at a discount.

If you already made the move to T1 lines years ago, you might still be able to save. Competitive prices for T1 voice lines, including long distance rates, have plummeted in the last few years. By running a competitive service check you can find out if a simple change of provider could result in significant cost savings for the very same usage.

The same logic applies to your business Internet service. A T1 dedicated Internet line might now be priced at half what you paid when you signed a multi-year lease years ago.T1 prices are very favorable right now and you can make a good deal getting into a better contract. Once again, you keep the same functionality you have now but simply pay less.

You might also want to consider some newer technologies, such as MPLS networks or Metro Ethernet to interconnect multiple business locations. SIP trunking offers a way to get high quality voice and data service delivered on a single line service. All of these services have become readily available only in the last few years. If they work for your situation, you could find very substantial cost savings available for the asking.

Quick Way to Cut the Corporate Phone Bill

With escalating commodity prices and surging fuel bills, many companies are in the big squeeze between rising costs and limited ability to raise prices. Things are moving so fast that it's hard to re-engineer or even rethink business strategy. The most viable solution to maintain profits is simply to cut costs.

At this point all the green eyeshades turn toward the phone bill. Are all those calls really necessary? Really?

Auditing the telecommunications bills is a smart move even when business is humming along smoothly. You can spot charges for unused or unneeded services that can be discontinued at a savings. Even a quick glance will reveal unusual activities such as a few employees who seem to hang on the phone all day making personal calls. But once you've picked the low hanging fruit, the job gets much harder and burns up a lot of time. Is there anything quicker?

Sure, just pay less.

That's right. The fastest way to cut your voice and data services bill is to simply pay less for exactly what you have now. If your telephone and Internet usage have grown along with your business, you might not have thought to challenge the increasing costs. After all, you are using more. But what's also changed over the years is the competitive landscape for digital voice and data. What was the best deal a few years ago may well be far more than you need to pay today.

But isn't finding vendors and going out for quotes even more time consuming than digging into the phone records?

It doesn't have to be. As a user, you're not really in a position to know where to look or how to evaluate the myriad of competitive options. But there is a professional service that will do this without charging you. It's a network of experienced telecom consultants connected through a sophisticated database system that lets them compare a dozen or more options for any given need. All you do is make a simple online or telephone inquiry and you'll get immediate attention.

Why is this likely to work for your business? Take telephone service, for instance. Your PBX telephone system likely uses or could use T1 PRI digital telephone trunking. This is the standard way to bring in multiple telephone lines to a centralized office phone system. T1 PRI pricing, including combinations of local, long distance, 800 numbers, DID (direct inward dialing) and Caller ID, is highly competitive. You may well be able to get the very same services you have now with the very same usage levels for a lower monthly bill.

The same is true for data services, such as dedicated Internet. In addition, the the standard T1 and DS3 Internet services, Ethernet connections have become available only recently. T1 and DS3 can be had for lower lease rates. If you can get Ethernet over copper or fiber connection, you'll save even more at higher bit rates.

Before you get too embroiled in cutting heads or making panic changes to your business processes, take a quick look at cutting your voice and data telecom expenses by simply paying less. You can do the hard stuff later.

Contact Center Telecom Service Savings

Contact Centers consolidate communication services for companies and other organizations. That includes the telephone call center, FAX messaging, email and mail room.

Today's contact centers are heavy users of electronic communications and are likely to be the major telecom cost center for the company. A typical contact center may have a combination of technologies that include individual analog telephone or FAX lines, T1 or DS3 based digital telephone trunks, SIP trunking for VoIP based communications, broadband dedicated Internet service, and perhaps point to point private lines for PBX tie lines or electronic data transfer.

What contact center managers really need are voice and data services that save them money while maintaining or improving center performance and reliability. Thanks to competitive carriers and new technology introductions, it is indeed possible to get more for your telecom dollar on your next service contract.

The most basic service is the standard telephone line for local and/or long distance calling. Many companies have a need for both incoming and outgoing calls plus multiple toll free lines. In the call center, screen pops generated by CTI or Computer Telephone Integration increase staff productivity. For this you need Caller ID information as well as a voice channel.

T1 PRI or ISDN PRI is the proven telephone trunking technology that gives you multiple phone lines that can be configured as required, Caller ID data, and fast call setup & teardown to improve efficiency. A single T1 PRI offers up to 23 lines plus a signaling and data channel. A larger PBX telephone system can be configured to accept multiple T1 PRI lines. If your contact center is large enough to require hundreds of phone lines, DS3 telephone service can easily provide this cost effectively.

Alternatively, small contact centers may enjoy the cost savings of combined telephone and Internet service on a single Integrated T1 line. Integrated T1 service works well for operations that need from 6 to 12 outside lines plus broadband Internet access for a small team.

A competing technology to the traditional T1 PRI digital trunk is called SIP Trunking. SIP is Session Initiation Protocol, a popular signaling format for VoIP based telephone systems. SIP Trunking offers a single private line network connection between the contact center and service provider for converged voice and data. The service provider handles call termination with the public switched phone network, usually at very attractive rates.

Regardless of whether your contact center employs only a few people or a large staff, it is well worth a few minutes of your time to see how much you can save on your telecommunication services. Get a quick online quote now and also a free consultation by our telecom experts who can match your requirements with the most cost effective service options.

TDM vs VoIP - Why Not Both?

Are you scratching your head over the great divide in enterprise telephony? Should you stay with your trusty TDM based PBX phone system or toss everything out in favor of VoIP? Stick with the tried and true and you fear that you may be missing out on services that could improve productivity. Scrap it all for a brand new VoIP solution and you may have a eye-popping capital expense to swallow. What to do?

Regardless of the impression you get from technical news reports and vendor ads, you have more options than you think. You don't have to make an all-or-nothing decision either way. You can decide whether to have analog, digital, or IP phones on each desk and whether to go with TDM or VoIP telephone services to connect with the outside world. Some systems will even allow you to mix and match. TDM? VoIP? Both? Why not?

Most any phone system that handles more than a few telephone handsets gives you an option on how to connect to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Perhaps you've accumulated analog phone lines to the point where you have a dozen or two plugged into FXO (Foreign eXchange Office) interface cards. In this case, a move to TDM or Time Division Multiplexing would make economic sense. TDM is the digital standard for standard telephone trunking. A T1 voice line or ISDN PRI is an example of a TDM connection that multiplexes up to a couple of dozen phone lines onto a single TDM trunk line.

T1 lines using the TDM protocol are the mainstay of enterprise PBX telephone systems. Most all offer slots for one or more T1 TDM-based telephone trunk lines. An alternative is the T1 PRI or ISDN PRI line that offers the same trunkline service plus additional services such as Caller ID.

Well, what about VoIP? A pure VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol phone system operates completely in the IP world from handset to call termination. The PBX equivalent is the IP PBX which is may be a dedicated system or software, such as Asterisk, running on a standard Linux server. The handsets are referred to as SIP phones. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching protocol that controls the phone calls on packet based networks. Even your phone service can be brought in on a SIP Trunk, which is a private line or Internet connection to your VoIP service provider. Calls between subscribers to the same VoIP service provider stay completely on the network and never enter the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Calls to and from non-subscribers are terminated to the PSTN at the provider's location.

As you might guess, there are purely Analog phone systems, purely digital and TDM phone systems and purely VoIP phone systems. Most of the time, though, you can mix and match. A VoIP system may well have FXS (Foreign Exchange Subscriber or Station) ports to connect to analog handsets, as do traditional PBX systems. The phone service connection may be analog, T1 or ISDN, or SIP Trunking.

In general the newer IP PBX telephone systems offer a wider range of handset and phone service connection options than legacy PBX systems. But before you make any big purchases or plans to scrap you current system, why not review your options with one of our expert voice and data service consultants. You may have better options than you think.

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.

SIP vs PRI Telephone Trunking

Telephone trunking is the means of transporting multiple telephone conversations across metro or long distances on a single line. The first approach to this used analog frequency division multiplexing in an approach known as carrier telephony. The noise and crosstalk associated with carrier telephony has long since been replaced by digital trunk lines using time division multiplexing techniques. But now TDM trunk lines are being challenged by an even newer technology called SIP trunking.

The impetus for SIP trunking is the move from the traditional circuit switched telephone world to packet switching. In other words, the traditional PBX system is giving way to the iPBX or VoIP telephone system. Does that mean that T1 telephone lines are yesterday's news? Not by a long shot.

The dirty little secret is that just about all business telephone systems with more than half a dozen phone lines are using T1 trunk lines or their big brother, the T3 line or DS3 connection. That includes the latest IP PBX systems, even those that are connected to their phone service providers via SIP trunking. The reason is simple. T1 lines are the most universally available and cost effective carriers commonly available.

The real discussion is what format T1 line to employ. Business office PBX systems and call centers usually want a variant known as T1 PRI. The PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface, a term that comes from a set of telecommunication standards called ISDN or Integrated Services Digital Network. What PRI adds to a standard channelized T1 line is a dedicated signaling channel that makes call setup and teardown faster, plus the ability to provide Caller ID and ANI (Automatic Number Identification.) A T1 PRI line gives you 23 channels that can each carry one telephone call plus the data or signaling channel. If you need more phone lines, simply add another T1 PRI line to your system. If you need a lot more phone lines, say more than 4 or 5 T1 PRI lines worth, you may find it more cost effective to upgrade to a T3 line or DS3 service on fiber optic carrier.

SIP trunking also uses a T1 line, but one configured differently than a T1 PRI line. In this case, channelization is unnecessary because the phone conversations are assigned to packets, not channels. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is a switching system used for IP telephony, also known as VoIP. SIP is becoming more popular, supplanting other switching protocols in VoIP phone systems.

Both T1 PRI and SIP trunks connect between your phone system and your telephone service provider. Which you select depends on your system's capabilities and the provider that terminates your calls to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. It is not necessarily true that a new VoIP phone system will automatically use a SIP trunk for service. In fact, many IP PBX systems are ordered with T1 PRI interface cards because the best service deal may well be from a competitive supplier providing PRI local and/or long distance telephone service.

Not sure what to order or if you are getting the best possible deal from your current service provider? Let our expert consultants help you get the best lease rates on the most cost effective voice and/or data services for your business needs.