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What Was ISDN?

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Re: What Was ISDN?

#71

Post by pezezin »

junga wrote: post #53
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

And then came the switch from ISDN to DSL and the latency got worse again.

I remember that back in the xDSL days we had never-ending discussions about interleaving vs fast-path. If you could enable fast-path, you could reduce your latency in half, but not all ISP supported it and your connection would be more sensitive to noise and errors, so it was not always worth it.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#73

Post by andirk »

ashurov wrote: post #28

Got ISDN as a previous job as parttime helpdesk employee at an ISP. Together with the rise of numberous dail-up providers, including the legendary Superweb. It would allow free internet against a fix rate, not paying per minute, which was something new for the Netherlands. It would only allow one or two hours after it would disconnect you and you had to redial. Due their succes getting dialed in again could take quit…

Very cool! What was your language of choice for this script? I'm guessing perl. I've only done port stuff with C though.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#74

Post by Aldipower »

At the end of the century, 1999, I had one of the first and also one of the last ISDN internet flatrates, offered here in Germany. It cost around 60 Deutsche Mark per month. Around year 2000 this ISDN flatrate became obsolete, because DSL was pushed into the market, also with a flatrate option. Now you could get 786kbit/s instead of 64kbit/s. :) I used my (and my only one) ISDN telephone to 2017 though. It lasted almost 20 years without any problems. Then we moved and now it is all VoIP.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#75

Post by riedel »

Aldipower wrote: post #74

At the end of the century, 1999, I had one of the first and also one of the last ISDN internet flatrates, offered here in Germany. It cost around 60 Deutsche Mark per month. Around year 2000 this ISDN flatrate became obsolete, because DSL was pushed into the market, also with a flatrate option. Now you could get 786kbit/s instead of 64kbit/s. :) I used my (and my only one) ISDN telephone to 2017 though. It lasted alm…

We are still using our ISDN phone behind a FritzBox DSL Router. S0 Bus still works nicely and is much easier to setup compared to multiple VoIP phones in your house. Particularly supporting multiple phone numbers is nice. Actually all our phones we use are pre 2000s. The newer ones we had never lasted both in terms of design and tech. I think at work our Alcatel phone system also uses a modified version of the s0 bus (with numbers tied to the port )

Re: What Was ISDN?

#76

Post by marcusb »

dylan604 wrote: post #14
sgt wrote: post #4

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…

> Well, it wasn't actually 128k. Technical reasons limited it to 112k. That's why 56k instead of 64k modems.

That’s not fundamentally true about ISDN - in North America, at least, most basic rate connections and every single PRI I ever encountered had eight-bit-clean channels and were true 64kbps.

With modems (I assume you mean analog modems,) that was only part of the reason. There were others that would have been far more difficult to solve in practice, and there was largely no point in doiny so as xDSL technologies came around at roughly the same time.

Multilink PPP worked quite well, even beyond bonding two channels.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#77

Post by api »

I find it much more amazing that T1 dates back to 1962. What could talk at 1.5mbps in 1962? Mainframes I guess?

Then there’s the fact that this speed remained fairly state or the art until DSL and then cable modems.

There was also T3 in the 1990s for a whopping 45mbps. I worked for a bit for an ISP in Cincinnati in college that had one of those running to a data center. That DC was full of racks of Windows NT machines with unused mice hanging off the back of each so they would boot properly.

Those days were both fun and awful. It was really a frontier feeling but the tech was clunky and connectivity was expensive.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#78

Post by bbu »

ISDN is what made my parents’ phone bill explode. 128kb/s with two channels was like a dream come true haha

Re: What Was ISDN?

#79

Post by robotvert »

The condo I'm living in (in Tokyo) was built 20 or so years ago and features a karaoke room for the residents. We recently got a notice about how they will have to do a full makeover of the karaoke system because the current one only works with ISDN and the vendor is phasing out support. IIRC the quote for the makeover was around $10k

Re: What Was ISDN?

#80

Post by netman21 »

I launched RustNet in 1992 as "the first ISDN ISP in Michigan." We offered a blindingly fast internet speed of 125k! At the time Silicon Graphics had added an ISDN port to its latest workstation, which I had for the engineering design work we did. The launch of our ISP occurred at an industrial expo at Cobo Hall in Detroit. We were not set up yet so I talked to the product manager of the ISDN feature at SGI and he was kind enough to let me dial into his desktop workstation in his office. All I needed was to get Ameritech to drop an ISDN line into Cobo Hall. One trick we learned: if a regular dial-up customer complained about speeds we would call Ameritech to schedule that customer for ISDN. The phone company would remove something from the line (filter? impedance?) to prepare it for ISDN. Then we would cancel the order and the customer would get the full 56k from their modem.
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