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What Was ISDN?

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Re: What Was ISDN?

#141

Post by ttepasse »

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…

I must have had the same flatrate provider: Sonnet, I believe it was named.

It had perfect timing: starting in the market when I was fresh out of school and doing civil service as conscious objector, meaning I had a little bit of money to splurge for an ISDN flatrate at my parents house and it cancelled its ISDN flatrate tariff in fall 2000, when I moved out into my own little apartment and got T-DSL.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#142

Post by snvzz »

xp84 wrote: post #111
snvzz wrote: post #106

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.

Widespread, I guess in completely new construction maybe. AT&T in particular has proven they care nearly not at all to roll out their fiber product to residential, even when they were still stubbornly doing FTTN out of cheapness. I’m still sad that Google pulled the plug on investment in Google Fiber. The only thing that could possibly have egged American telcos on enough to build a real network.

>I guess in completely new construction maybe.

No, but Europe/Asia, rather than the US.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#143

Post by jandrese »

paradox460 wrote: post #132
jandrese wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That would be nice. My local fiber option is Verizon or nothing. Verizon's tech works very well, but their customer service is terrible. Many people think that Verizon only pushed FiOS as hard as they did because it gave them a way to push out the competitors they had on DSL. Once DSL died off so did their drive to deploy FiOS.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#144

Post by kjs3 »

icedchai wrote: post #122
toomuchtodo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember those days! I know a couple guys that got DSL over those alarm pairs.

There were a couple of us around here who had the alarm circuit hack for DSL until Bellsouth finally figured out how to make it impossible to order. It was never easy, but (I assume) neglect of the systems, changes in tariffing and oversight, and BS not wanting to sell it finally let them get away with not provisioning the service without explicitly saying 'no'.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#145

Post by kjs3 »

kstrauser wrote: post #87
Sharlin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

We used to play Quakeworld and later Team Fortress after hours at our office. A networking consultancy. Where we went through dedicated T1s, multimegabit SMDS on to metro ethernet. We were the LPBs and got accused of cheating constantly, which was kinda true.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#146

Post by kjs3 »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #85
luma wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the Southeast, you could get it but it took some more or less annoying negotiating with Bellsouth bureaucracy, usually had install issues because the residential installers didn't do it that often, and it was way more than double the cost of dialup. There were plenty of ISPs.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#147

Post by kjs3 »

linsomniac wrote: post #117
geertj wrote: post #109

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…

I was lucky enough to have a grandfathered flat-rate ISDN in my apartment in ~94-97. I had one of those Motorola BitSurfr modems, and would keep it up to my ISP with 128Kbps, but if a phone call came in it would drop one so I had 64K and could talk on the phone. Invariably, these calls were people looking to post adverts in the Thrifty Nickel paper. My number was close to theirs. I ended up staying in a small apartme…

If your house was provisioned with a T1, you already had all the things that routinely screw up a xDSL connection fixed.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#148

Post by edwhitesell »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #85
luma wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This was similar to my experience in SE Michigan & NW Ohio in the late '90s to early '00s. Ameritech required you to order 2 ISDN phone lines, which cost somewhere around $80 per month, each. ISPs charged extra for the ISDN services, too.

Re: What Was ISDN?

#149

Post by rasz »

jowea wrote: post #130
calamari4065 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least there would be an integrated payment system that works for microtransactions. Maybe we wouldn't have had the adweb.

Telcos actually realized that dream in cellular networks. Tons of scams followed with random webservers automagically charging your wireless plan for "services"

https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/chunyi/pubs/ccs12-peng.pdf

Re: What Was ISDN?

#150

Post by musha68k »

applied_heat wrote: post #121
musha68k wrote: post #113

ISDN absolutely was exhilarating “technology from the future” during the 90s and even into ~2000 era just before general cable/DSL proliferation. It usually just worked consistently and at unbelievably high data rates vs theoretical “56k” even on 64kbit/s single channel. Meaning basically 2x IRL downloads vs 56k at usually tenable full hop bandwidth of constant 8kb/s. I kept being mesmerized by “just the basics” of I…

I got 2.2/1.1 mbit Adsl in 1997, it was awesome! Really helped me dominate in quake

That would have been unfathomable to me at the time. Where was that?
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