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What Was ISDN?

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Re: What Was ISDN?

#101

Post by nsagent »

In the late 90s, I lived in rural Appalachia and had terrible pings with lots of packet loss on my 56k modem. Found a local ISDN provider and my parents paid to have the ISDN line installed into my bedroom.

I was in heaven! Now I could play Action Quake 2 and Quake 3 Arena without glitching all the time! Those were good times :)

Re: What Was ISDN?

#103

Post by mechanicalpulse »

sllabres wrote: post #47

Back then we had four primary rate connections 2.048MBit/s each (30 ISDN B channel) to transmit data to several subsidiaries. This was quite a lot of bandwidth at the time. Our litte on demand network started at 02:00 in the night when tariff was lower (paid by connection time, not by volume :D) and used Ascend and Cisco routers Ascend was always much quicker setting up MPPP channel and therefor preferred, but Ciscos…

I thought primary rate interfaces were 24 channels (23 bearer channels plus one data channel) for a total throughput rate of 1.5 Mb/s, but apparently that’s only the case in the US, Canada, and Japan. European PRIs (E1 vs T1) are as you described. TIL.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#104

Post by _the_inflator »

ISDN was somewhat mandatory in Germany for internet access during the 90th. Carriers pushed it very hard.

The combination of both channels was a unique selling position to leave modem speed in the dust. 64kbps could be combined to 128kbps simultaneous download speed - of course, it costs you twice as much. ;)

The downside later on was, that it took a long time till the next generation was available, in Germany it was DSL.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#105

Post by Tijdreiziger »

tptacek wrote: post #21

On the ISP side, ISDN was a crucial part of scaling out dial-up ISPs. CLECs (Bay Baby Bells) would route calls from geographically large calling areas --- all of Chicago, say --- to a single colo cage on an ISDN PRI. Access concentrators (then called "terminal servers" --- Portmasters, Ascend routers, Cisco AS5x00s) would take 56k modem calls on individual PRI channels.

Incidentally, The Serial Port on YouTube (no affiliation) is doing an excellent series on old-school ISPs, getting hands-on with the equipment to set up their own ISP.

Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7qsY2QIYd8PLW1zXVcNFVA_o...

Re: What Was ISDN?

#106

Post by snvzz »

The real shame is that PSTN lines continued to be installed through decades, despite ISDN existence.

Thankfully, wrongs have finally been righted with FTTP/FTTH being widespread now.

I enjoyed ISDN internet access at 128kbps via high school in the mid 90s, and shitty v90 through early 2000s.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#107

Post by masto »

I love all the anecdotes here. The mid-90s were a time of the creation, explosive growth, and decline and fall of the Internet Service Provider industry. Like many other people here, apparently, it was a big part of my life. I worked at three nascent ISPs, the third of which I started with a friend from college, and it was where I learned a ton about networking, sysadmin (FreeBSD), software development, handling customers, etc., that turned out to be foundational to my career decades later.

And I did have ISDN at my house for a time. (Bonded, blazing 128k!) We used the Centrex trick that was mentioned elsewhere in the comments.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#108

Post by toomuchtodo »

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…

Another trick was to ask the ILEC for an alarm circuit between two premises, giving you a dedicated circuit via dry copper pairs between them.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#109

Post by geertj »

One really cool thing about ISDN was that it connected almost instantaneously (within a second). In fact I remember the first time I used it, I thought the connection had failed because I could not imagine it connected so fast. This allowed you to have the illusion of being always online by auto dialing just in time. I remember setting up modemd (IIRC) to keep the connection open for at least the minumum charge time of my telco provider. This was in NL some time in the 90s.
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