sip trunking what is bri and pri

Don't waste your time with SIP - too many risks, unless the provider is the same as you Internet company, which is rare.

PRI all the way... BUT:

You can do both for unique situations. One cool way to ADD SIP to the mix is to hang remote SIP extensions off of your PBX, but only one way: Make sure you have a dedicated data connection between your remote extensions and your PBX.

I just finished setting this up and it works great, saves a lot of money. My client has a main office with 4 branch offices. The main office, where the PBX is, has a PRI into Trixbox with 10 lines. The rest of the channels are a internet data, and dedicated only to the PBX. Then, each branch office has a DSL connection from the SAME ISP, including the T1. Each branch office has 5-10 quality SIP phones using the DSL circuit to connect to the main office's PBX using the DSL connection. These phones use g729 to optimize bandwidth.

This works FLAWLESSLY. We have 10 lines (in one location) with over 50 extensions in five 5 locations that act like one office. Calls transfer back and forth seamlessly and calls can be managed with an IVR and a single receptionist. Call quality is perfect.

Client is very pleased.

What is MANDATORY is that you use ONE ISP for all your internet connections so that the traffic stays on their backbone. Make sure they are not using anyone else's backbone. Check hops between the locaitons using tracert - make sure it's only their routers, and only a couple. Do NOT share the internet connections with other applications in the office, leave them dedicated to the phone system. Total cost savings is huge when you figure what it would cost to do with T1's at each location or a Pots/T1 combination.

I'll talk about the cool Internet based VPN and File Sharing/synch using Small Business Sever and DFS so anyone can get to any file fast anytime on another day... :-)

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