I had an ADSL connection in France in the late 90s. It did not do bonding of the 2B channels so was limited to 64kbps, but the latency was much better than with a modem so it felt much snappier.
What Was ISDN?
61–70 of 164 posts
Re: What Was ISDN?
#62We used to use ISDN for our videoconference system (PictureTel –expen$ive), in the early 1990s.
We used one half of a line (64KB).
The quality was … less than ideal, and the latency was about two seconds.
We also used it for our corporate Internet connection.
I don’t miss it.
Re: What Was ISDN?
#63In Japan, they used to have ISDN phone booths (what is a “phone booth”?). These were grey phones. Never tried using one.
Re: What Was ISDN?
#64I remember visiting relatives in Switzerland in the 90s and it was the first time I’d seen ISDN - felt like they were living in the future while we were still on dialup in the US. I was thinking earlier today how when I was that age how amazing it would be to have fiber someday - has taken 25 years but I finally have it at home, and it still isn’t fast or reliable enough
ISDN was widely available in the US (it ran on the same copper pairs you already had) but was never all that popular. You could essentially _always_ get it deployed and it was the base-level connectivity back in the 90s for remote sites. I had it installed in a few crappy apartments much to the confusion of the local installers, the line price wasn't crazy expensive but finding a local ISP that would agree to reasonable always-on pricing was more challenging.
Re: What Was ISDN?
#65Don’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…
I had 56k FR at home in the 90’s. I worked for an ISP and it was a perk offered to some employees. The connection never went down once in 4+ years. The reliability must have depended on your LEC.
Re: What Was ISDN?
#66I still have PCI and ISA Fritz ISDN cards somewhere, if anyone wants them.
Re: What Was ISDN?
#67ISDN 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…
Yeah I think the binding of the lines was much easier with ISDN as one never went through the analog level (except if you want to be really pedantic). It was digital from the ISDN adapter. No ringtone etc.
Re: What Was ISDN?
#68ISDN did have multiple channels, in Germany you would get two data channels (B1 and B2-channel, 64 kB/s), and the line has a D-channel (something like 4kB/s) for network purposes. First you could bundle the B-channels to get twice the speed, at twice the price and the land line was busy if one did that. That feature got me into trouble with my parents quite regularly. Second someone figured out that the D-channel can…
Oh yes, the D channel, holy grail of always-on dreams. Young me spent countless hours staring at AVM header files dreaming of finding an angle that would enable me to sneak free bytes to a friend who also had ISDN.
Re: What Was ISDN?
#69ISDN did have multiple channels, in Germany you would get two data channels (B1 and B2-channel, 64 kB/s), and the line has a D-channel (something like 4kB/s) for network purposes. First you could bundle the B-channels to get twice the speed, at twice the price and the land line was busy if one did that. That feature got me into trouble with my parents quite regularly. Second someone figured out that the D-channel can…
When we first got Internet at home (also Germany), it was ISDN, but only single channel. So being connected meant not being reachable by phone. That meant my mom strictly limited our Internet access to 1-2 hours a day. I was so glad when we finally got that second channel :D
Re: What Was ISDN?
#70It Still Does Nothing.
Right at the start of the 2000s DayJob had ISDN (initially using one channel then the two bonded for 128kbit), and while it was night and day compared to the unreliable 42/21¹ I got at home from a nominally 56k connection², it wasn't all that impressive compared to what I was used to at university in terms of throughput most³ of the time.
Admittedly the office was well out of town making a "proper" leased line extortionately expensive, so ISDN was the best practical option until we moved.
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[1] or 33k6 when I forced it to use that standard to get the faster upstream rate
[2] always on, fixed addresses, faster, didn't drop if a sparrow farted nearby, …
[3] the link we had there did get over-contended at times, but not as much as you might think as this was before connections were available on dorms so Pele had to head to a computer room to get online so if I did get lower than ISDN performance it was likely due to the other end or peering limitations between