11–20 of 164 posts
until cable & DSL came along, it was awesome.
Extremely overpriced in my area.
Also the only solution from private telcos at around the same time, where said former gov telco simply wouldn't offer early DSL at all, while private upstart offered ISDN whith dynamic channel bundling at flat rated 29,99 per month, so 128Kbs! Yay!
Since it was pushed so hard by subsidies, many had it, the equipment was cheap, and the sound quality that came with it was rather good. Often still unmatched by some crap which people accept as 'normal' nowadays.
ISDN 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.
Of course, ISDN and 2 56K connections are only similar in bitrate and are not the same thing at all.
the hack (in the US) was that ISDN was often offered as part of "centrex" service which was a sort of phone company managed PBX-as-a-service offering. so rather than businesses setting up their own local mini telephone switch (a PBX) that they'd hang all their extension phones off of, they'd just get ISDN phones and connect directly to the phone company and have the phone company manage it all. the trick was that "intercom" calls within a centrex were unmetered (think intra-office calling), so an approach to building an ISP would have been to sign up for centrex service and then install a branch phone on that centrex at each customer site, then all calls into the ISP would be intercom calls and would be subject to unmetered tariff.
i used to drool over the idea of one day getting my hands on an ascend pipeline 50 and its sweet, sweet 128kbps of bandwidth. then one day i finagled a visit to a local software company and met the founder who was struggling with getting one working (it was paired with one in his home, so he could make use of the company's t1). he jokingly offered that if i could get it working he'd offer me a job: 45 minutes later the link was up and few hours after that i was shaking hands with the head of engineering as they made good on the founder's word. fun times!
ISDN 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.
Well, it wasn't actually 128k. Technical reasons limited it to 112k. That's why 56k instead of 64k modems. There was the Shotgun Modem which required 2 separate phone lines, but would bind them together. I never bothered reading up on how binding 2 PPP connections worked, but I guess it worked well enough that it was a legit product being sold. I went from 28.8k to ISDN, so I skipped the 56k altogether. Of course, IS…
in the mid-90s it was often the only option for >14.4kbps internet in residential areas. unfortunately the tariffs charged by the minute for voice and data calls so it was prohibitively expensive (at least for our household). the hack (in the US) was that ISDN was often offered as part of "centrex" service which was a sort of phone company managed PBX-as-a-service offering. so rather than businesses setting up their…
ISDN was night and day. Had a 56k Zyxel before getting 64k ISDN. Speed wasn't much faster, but dialing was instant!
Man, the idea that ISDN was going to last 50 years has to be one of the bleakest Bellhead memes I think I've ever heard. "You will only have 144kbps and be happy."