PRI vs. Trunk Cards for Opt 11c

[chadmiller]

We are trying to decided if it will be better and more cost effective to go with either 1 or 2 PRI's commared to the cost of going with Trunks. We have a dual cabint option 11c that has no free slots in it at all and 3 universal trunk cards as well as analog and digital cards. The universal trunks are used for 17 Ground Start Trunks as well as 3 additional ports being used for music on hold, and intercoming. As well over 30 lines that are used for fax machines and direct in dial lines that do not go thru the switch. I do have additonal space on analog cards to be able to move the 30 devices (modems, fax machines, and security systems) into the pbx. Would I be able to get away with moving these devices into the pbx assigning them a DID and using a pri over the trunk lines. The pbx is running version 2111 release 23 issue 18+ I know that I would be looking at the cost of the pri card as well as any costs for intergration. Our phone provider has told us that the cost of maitining our lines is going to go from 11 dollars a month to 30 dollars a month per line but that we can purchase a single pri for 400 - 500 a month and blocks of 25 numbers if we wanted to go with DID lines.

Also are there any types of tools that I can run to monitor how many of my trunk lines get used concurently.

I'm sorry if this is worded a bit confusing as I have only been handed the job of maintaing this switch recently and have little to no training on it. Any help or insite would be greatful at this point.

 

[srmega41]

A good rule of thumb is less than 10 trunks, go with analog. Anything over that, and PRI is a better cost product. If you have 17+3 Universal Trunk Card(UTC) ports being used, you can reduce the number of cards needed by 1 (3 total UTC cards now, 1 PRI plus 1 UTC). Going with PRI, you will increase the number of trunks available to 23, so your analog devices should fit right in.

As for traffic, you can use LD 2 do some traffic analysis, but you may be better off asking your provider to run a two-week traffic study (although you may just do the install and run the study after the PRI is in). That would tell you if you need a second one (I don't suspect you do).

If you do a search on this forum, you could get multiple posts on how to install a PRI.

Hope this helps,

Scott M.

 

[GHTROUT]

I agree with the math of costs..however, when we install PRI, we do it in pairs because 9 out of 10 times the telco perfroms intrusive testing no matter what we report as trouble. If you are a stock trading firm, the cost of backup is easy to justify. Otherwise, one PRI often will be fine

I have a traffic spreadsheet at my web site that you canb use as your initiam discovery tool

^{Gene of}

http://www.GHTROUT.com

 

[johnpoole]

both post are right, you do have to keep one analog trunk card for the moh. but the price is going up on analog trunks as the providers encourage users to go digital. push your provider, that pri cost is a little high. nothing magic about pri, you don't need test equiptment as an end user and did gives you a lot of options. the bad thing is the fax numbers, those are hard to change. if you fix call forward them to the did's, customers will never quite dialing them. and that cost almost as much as paying for the analog lines.. other then that it's a no brainer. we don't have any analog lines with over 30 t's.. 20 years ago just maint on that many trunks would have been a full time job.. now ld 60 lcnt, stat takes 3 minutes a day

john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc

 

[chadmiller]

Our provider has given us the option to move our existing fax and other misc numbers over to a block of pri numbers that would DID into the switch so that we get the cost savings of going with a pri for all numbers and not just for the 17 trunk lines. So I think that the cost savings there would be great. I'm going to try and figure out how to do a traffic study this week. Thank you for all you help.