We recently had the opportunity to test both Allo’s 4 port BRI gateway and their 4 port BRI Card.

As BRI is not available from our local phone carriers we set up the Gateway as the “carrier” end with Card inside the PBX.

Tests included: 1) Calling out over 1 BRI channel and then back into the PBX over another BRI channel. 2) Calling out over 1 BRI channel and then back into the PBX over SIP connection. These tests allowed us to see how both worked in a combination of NT/TE modes. Configuring the Gateway was straight forward and very easy. A sample of the Admin GUI is located under the User Interface tab on the Gateway page. The cards were a little harder to configure as they require you move jumpers or switches to change between NT and TE modes. The image in the user guide was not clear, but Allo support was able to send this image that clarified how to configure the card.

The other physical configuration issue we had was which cable pinout to use in our lab setting as there was no carrier involved. For this we used an RJ-45 Straight cable to connect Allo BRI card with the Allo BRI gateway. Pin out should be:

Although the Gateway configuration GUI has 2 mode options: PTP and PTMP, currently the gateway does not support PTP mode, so you can only use the PTMP mode. Once we got this clarified it worked well for us. Keep in mind that the PTMP is default option for BRI on Asterisk. As always, the Allo support team was very helpful in getting the lab configuration setup. They took the time to help us configure and test the system as we were looking at a non-standard install. By using a few softphones we were able to make a variety of test calls between the BRI and SIP lines. For a normal configuration of connecting a PBX to BRI lines this worked very well. Places you may consider the gateway vs the cards:

* PBX cannot add another card
* High Availability or multiple PBX solutions
* Adding SIP services to a legacy PBX that has BRI ports

We highly recommend these products for your BRI needs.