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What Was ISDN?

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Re: What Was ISDN?

#131

Post by technofiend »

Many fond memories from using ISDN, but there was also some frustration. How far you were from the Central Office played a critical role on whether you could get ISDN and I was at the limit. Ended up switching equipment more than once trying to find the perfect device that could deal with whatever signal issues came from being around 15,000 wire feet from the CO.

Haven't seen much mentioned about it but as I recall ISDN was also symmetrical vs analog modems which had a small back channel. Equal upload speed made it easy to keep up with sites that enforced a sharing ratio.

ISDN also exposed the call setup information sort of like caller ID did on analog lines, but it came over the control channel instead of between ring one and ring two on a Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) line. Some ISDN devices had call handling that was pretty sophisticated - a precursor to Asterix and like software/customer managed PBXs. The upshot was you could screen and reject calls prior to their tying up one of your channels. And if you did want to take a voice call, you could take one channel down and still have a 64k network connection going while your wife used the other to talk to her sister. Huge wife acceptance factor vs "Don't pick up the phone, I'm using the computer!"

Re: What Was ISDN?

#132

Post by paradox460 »

jandrese wrote: post #35
russh wrote: post #6

Extremely overpriced in my area.

This was my experience too. I was looking for something better than the 56k modem, but ISDN was 10 times as expensive and like 20% faster. In the end I was stuck on modem until DSL finally rolled out in my area. One thing I miss about DSL was that it was open. You had your choice of several competing ISPs that offered service over the same lines. You could get some very nice fast service with lots of features for che…

Fwiw open access fiber systems have that now. In Utah you can actually subscribe to multiple ISPs over Utopia fiber, and it's mostly just an issue of configuring your terminal to talk to them.

Since it's a 100% eithernet network, any off the shelf device with an SFP cage can connect to it

Re: What Was ISDN?

#133

Post by cdcarter »

Was glad to see some facts about using ISDN for voice acting in there. When I was a teen, my interests were split between computers and theater. I was SHOCKED when I found out some of the actors I got to work with had ISDN, and not for internet!

Re: What Was ISDN?

#134

Post by aleph_minus_one »

calamari4065 wrote: post #129
jmbwell wrote: post #124

The article addresses the big miscalculation by the telecoms, as I see it, though somewhat obliquely. In the telecom world, the telecom was the network. If you wanted to exchange data with someone, you placed a call to someone directly. Everything was envisioned as some form of point to point session between subscribers. Whatever it was, it was one subscriber contacting another. The telecoms didn’t really conceive of…

Imagine if instead of resolving a name to an IP address, it resolved to a phone number. Loading any modern webpage would take a week of dialing to fetch all the ads and trackers.

> Imagine if instead of resolving a name to an IP address, it resolved to a phone number. Loading any modern webpage would take a week of dialing to fetch all the ads and trackers.

FYI:

- Minitel (France): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel This service was quite successful

- Bildschirmtext (BTX, Germany): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext Less successful than Minitel in France, but also had its users

Re: What Was ISDN?

#135

Post by micheljansen »

ISDN was quite popular (albeit expensive) in the Netherlands. I remember enviously watching at a friends house how you could connect instantly without dialling up and how 64k was significantly faster than “56k”. Then we bundled the lines to get 128k and went onto Napster. Boom!

Re: What Was ISDN?

#137

Post by fmajid »

fmajid wrote: post #61

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.

Whoops, I meant an ISDN connection.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#138

Post by prpl »

kstrauser wrote: post #83
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…

Is this really why I could never go past 28.8k? I was 16 at that time, always wondered why - and experienced this in a few different homes until we switched to DSL.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#139

Post by teh_klev »

adamretter wrote: post #92

Back around 1996 I was working for a non-profit rural digital project in Devon, Southwest England, called Project COSMIC. If I recall correctly there were 2 main types of ISDN in the UK at that time (a) on-demand, which was similar to dial-up, and needed an ISDN modem, or (b) leased line ISDN which was always on 24x7 and terminated in a Router. I was lucky enough at COSMIC to have access to a 64 Kbit/s ISDN leased li…

> 64 Kbit/s ISDN leased line

That would have been Kilostream which wasn't part of the ISDN system. Kilostream pre-dated ISDN. The reason for its high cost was that you could throw as much data as you wanted to 24hrs a day and it was a point to point dedicated circuit, i.e. you couldn't "dial up" different locations the way you could with ISDN.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#140

Post by mjcl »

kstrauser wrote: post #83
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…

> Winmodem.

Memories! An old job bulk-bought a ton of cheap "home" PCs (Compaq Presario) to use as Citrix desktop clients; the included modem was a winmodem. We discovered the CPU in the PCs couldn't reliably run the Citrix software and maintain a modem connection at the same time. We ended up having to buy external modems (and later network cards) for all the presarios.

Thankfully we learned from the experience and stuck purchasing from the "business" product lines after that.

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