[lug] Delightful ISDN technology (was: Re: Business VOIP Advice...)

[Nate Duehr]

On Sep 3, 2009, at 8:47 PM, Sean Reifschneider wrote:

> On 09/03/2009 11:36 AM, Nate Duehr wrote:
>> little off-shoot that technology is!  (I always thought it was a  
>> clever
>
> The thing that pissed the telcos off, and why they pretty quickly  
> changed
> from unlimited local ISDN calling to per-minute charges, is that the  
> ISDN
> 128kbps service tied up two phone line channels worth of bandwidth  
> whether
> you were sending something across it or not.  I had my line set up  
> so that
> normally it only had one line up, and when I started using it  
> particularly
> heavily it would bring the other channel up.  Since an ISDN call  
> took less
> than a second to fully connect, IIRC, it wasn't a big deal.

Yeah, I did the same thing.  For its day, it was one of those "wow"  
kinda things after having spent too many years with analog modems.   
(Loved your comment about "if I never hear another modem training ever  
again...".  Around that same time our "VPN" to the office was a big  
bank of rackmount Motorola UDS modems in a chassis, and they all had  
speakers.  After an evening in the switchroom (for some reason we  
never commanded the speakers all the way off, which was possible via  
the front-panel buttons on those "fancy" modems, but we did turn them  
down to "low") you were really sick of listening to people from all  
over the place dialing into the modem pool.  LOL!

> So, IDSL makes a lot of sense.  It allows them to provide ISDN to  
> places
> that can't get DSL, without having to tie up that bandwidth between  
> the
> switches.

Yeah, it was a good "natural progression" as DSL arrived but couldn't  
go very many thousands of cable-feet.  ISDN gets deployed with  
repeaters in line where necessary, similar to copper T1's back then  
(now everything gets to a relatively "closer" location via fiber and  
then jumps into the copper outside plant in most areas, but in older  
neighborhoods, that copper still runs all the way back to the Central  
Office servicing that neighborhood), so it can be extended a very long  
distance from the CO.  The upper limit is a physical one based on time- 
delay, not on signal strength on the wire, unlike DSL.

Since we're talking about small biz here originally -- I should  
mention that I've had a number of small business owner friends in the  
Front Range rave about the pricing and reliability of Qwests MPLS  
network also, for those following along and interested in what  
businesses are using for bandwidth these days.  One had a business  
that had three "medium bandwidth" offices that all needed  
connectivity.  With the way Qwest worked with them to customize it,  
they not only had their Net connectivity set up on Day 1 of the  
install, but also had a VLAN that was "internal only" between all the  
sites, saving him having to install servers at every location (or at  
least saving him one location, he decided to do a server at two of the  
locations, one backing up the other).  Latency and bandwidth were  
good, and I was mostly shocked at how LOW (relatively) the price was  
for all that he got...

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com

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