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What Was ISDN?

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Re: What Was ISDN?

#81

Post by pavlov »

Obligatory reference — electronica legends the Future Sound of London (FSOL) [1] produced an album called "ISDN" that was originally broadcast over ISDN lines in 1994:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDN_(album)

It's an interesting relic of a specific cultural moment in time just before the Internet broke through. With ISDN, you could send a nearly hi-fi quality digital audio stream to anywhere in the world, but it wasn't yet on the open network that would define the actual future we now live in. Quite fitting for a band with "future" in their name.

- -

[1] Even if you don't know FSOL by name, you've most likely heard their massive 1991 club hit "Papua New Guinea" somewhere.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#82

Post by angrygoat »

Here in Australia, ISDN Data over Voice (DoV) was in fairly common use. Telstra (the major telecom here particularly in those days) charged an untimed flat "local call" rate (a few tens of cents) for an ISDN voice call, and by the minute for an ISDN data call. It didn't take many minutes for a voice call to be vastly cheaper.

At a technical level both types of call are a 64kbps data connection, with just a flag to discriminate between the two. All the major suppliers (Cisco, Nortel, ...) had software options for their ISDN gateways to tell them to set the voice flag when making an outgoing data connection, and to treat voice calls as data calls when they were received.

This was extremely common and Telstra never seemed to do anything about it. Just a funny memory that this article brought to mind.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#83

Post by kstrauser »

netman21 wrote: post #80

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 wa…

Ahh, good ol’ pair gain, where the ILEC would basically share one circuit between 2 houses. Saves money from not having to run a second circuit, plus the sound quality isn’t too awful as long as you’re deaf.

I also worked at an ISP. Customers would sometimes call to complain about how much we must suck because their shiny new 56k modem wouldn’t train up past 28.8, and it couldn’t possibly be on their end because they lived in a neighborhood of brand new McMansions. That’s when we had the diplomatic mission of explaining how Ma Bell saved a whole lot of money at the expense of the customer’s phone quality.

As long as we’re swapping horror stories, I can summarize another one in 1 word:

Winmodem.

shudder

Re: What Was ISDN?

#84

Post by ttyyzz »

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…

ISDN was the gold standard after the 56k modem time. Low latency included, which was very nice for online gaming. It lasted for a while but then DSL came around the corner and it was game over for ISDN.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#85

Post by poulsbohemian »

luma wrote: post #64
poulsbohemian wrote: post #29

I 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 reasona…

Then we had two very different lived experiences - my parents couldn’t get it in the Seattle area, I couldn’t get it where I was going to college in the midwest, and what I recall was that it was very expensive, like double the cost or more, or any available dial-up option.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#86

Post by austonianb »

netman21 wrote: post #80

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 wa…

Prepping a pair for ISDN could involve removing load coils (very common in more rural areas) or “designing” the pair by removing bridged taps. Both of these actions improved the quality of the facility. Also, if the facility ran through a pair gain system (or subscriber loop carrier) a reprovisioning onto a different card could be massively beneficial. I have fond recollections of the areas in rural Maine where the SLC mode kept my customers well below the maximum theoretical capability of their 56K modems, causing the normal complaints. Dialup was fun!

Re: What Was ISDN?

#87

Post by kstrauser »

Sharlin wrote: post #44
jonathanlydall wrote: post #40

I had ISDN in South Africa for a while back in the day. Aside from the higher throughput, one of the other great things about it compared to analogue dial-up modems was the almost instant connection speed while old analogue took tens of seconds, maybe even a minute. But the biggest thing that really made it feel “responsive” was its digital nature, meaning that your baseline latency was mere sub-10 milliseconds inste…

Yep, that latency thing was a huge deal to Quake(World) players back in the day. ISDN really did give a big (some would say unfair) advantage over "dialup lamers", and gaming was probably one of the main reasons for investing (or maybe more commonly, begging your parents to invest) in ISDN. Another advantage I don’t think the article mentioned was, of course, the ability for others in the household to use the regular…

Darn those Low Ping Bastards (which we all aspired to be).

Re: What Was ISDN?

#88

Post by kstrauser »

api wrote: post #77

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 machine…

Mainframes and voice channels. My mom’s office had several T1s to connect their DEC gear to other sites, and for their large PBX.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#89

Post by krylon »

yk wrote: post #38

ISDN 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…

I did my training at Deutsche Telekom, and our instructors told us a story of an ISP that tried to sell a flatrate working over the D-channel; apparently they had some reliability issues and did not last long. That must have been in 2003 or early 2004, by then of course DSL had arrived and rendered such experiments (and ISDN in general) more or less pointless.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#90

Post by krylon »

pavlov wrote: post #81

Obligatory reference — electronica legends the Future Sound of London (FSOL) [1] produced an album called "ISDN" that was originally broadcast over ISDN lines in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDN_(album) It's an interesting relic of a specific cultural moment in time just before the Internet broke through. With ISDN, you could send a nearly hi-fi quality digital audio stream to anywhere in the world, but it wa…

Great album. (Of course, all of their albums are great in my book. ;-) )
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