What Was ISDN?
tedium.co
What Was ISDN?
1–10 of 164 posts
Re: What Was ISDN?
#2Serbia (former Yugoslavia) was mostly in turmoil in the 90s, and while I did get online using dial-up in 1995, new tech was (very) slow to arrive: I used ISDN for a few short years in early 2000s before ADSL finally arrived. It was amazingly reliable even in Serbia.
But compared to the regular 20V phone line, ISDN used something like 120V (which I learned by carelessly changing the connector like I used to on the regular phones), and in a country where power went out regularly, I wondered how much power could I get out of it for emergency situations.
Re: What Was ISDN?
#3It was a fantastic album - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDN_(album)
Re: What Was ISDN?
#4ISDN was a great upgrade for me in the 1990s, and once I found out how to couple two lines into one "massive" 128k, it was pretty mind blowing. Connecting to the Internet was also snappy (as opposed to dialup with the whole modem song) and could even be done on demand if you were brave.
Re: What Was ISDN?
#5I had ISDN back in 1996 and it was great. It felt dramatically faster than a 56k modem because ISDN has much lower latency. Web pages were so simple in those days they loaded almost instantly.
Re: What Was ISDN?
#6Extremely overpriced in my area.
Re: What Was ISDN?
#7I had ISDN back in 1996 and it was great. It felt dramatically faster than a 56k modem because ISDN has much lower latency. Web pages were so simple in those days they loaded almost instantly.
I remember the jump from 28k and 56k to a 128k ISDN when playing Myth TFL, Quake 2 and Half-Life in the late 90s. It was marvelous!
Re: What Was ISDN?
#8Don’t forget Frame Relay, which was a good complement to ISDN.
Re: What Was ISDN?
#9Serbia (former Yugoslavia) was mostly in turmoil in the 90s, and while I did get online using dial-up in 1995, new tech was (very) slow to arrive: I used ISDN for a few short years in early 2000s before ADSL finally arrived. It was amazingly reliable even in Serbia. But compared to the regular 20V phone line, ISDN used something like 120V (which I learned by carelessly changing the connector like I used to on the reg…
20V? Germany has traditionally used 60V. The current spec allows 20V - 105V
https://www.nostalgietelefon.de/beachten/1TR110-1%20Ausgabe%...
Re: What Was ISDN?
#10Don’t forget Frame Relay, which was a good complement to ISDN.
Frame Relay was horrible, and the bane of our existence at the ISP.
We had a wide variety of customer connections, from dialup to an honest-to-God 14.4Kbps digital leased line, to 56K and T-1 leased lines and some T-3s in our backbone.
Our manager was a huge proponent of SMDS; in fact the SMDS diagrams made liberal use of the "cloud" icon to depict connections going in and out of the telco's switched network. He was able to derive great reliability and value from SMDS connections, and they were probably our fastest links available.
By contrast, Frame Relay was some sort of a hack to avoid having a "real" 56K line run to a customer, and they went down all the time. They were so unreliable, we could hardly stand it. The FR customers became quite disgruntled.
This was in the mid-90s. I don't know if FR improved after that time or got a better reputation elsewhere. But we would definitely rather not have it around.