🚀 go-pugleaf

Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

> Even Randy Suess never had ISDN. I don't understand how ISDN simply
> went through the modem pool. I thought you had your own circuit when
> there was ISDN on both ends.

On the ISP end there was either POTS lines or PRI's.

For the ISP to support isdn, you needed PRI's. They were also needed for
v.90 (56k dialup) when that came along.

Most isp's that came from the bbs days just used pots lines in the
beginning, mostly due to costs. Those worked fine up to 33k modems.

The main problem with pri circuits, especially in the 90's was cost.
Although you could buy fractional T1 circuits, the pri I don't think was
ever offered that way. A bargain was around $600-$650 a month, it did
support 23 channels (lines), or 24 depending how you used it, but at the
time there wasn't any way to support wide area calling.

So if you wanted to cover like downtown and out by O'hare, you needed two of
them programmed with different dial-up numbers.

On the consumer end, naturally if you wanted to use isdn, you needed to
order an isdn line, plus buy a terminal adapter which wasn't that cheap
either. 

I think we used to prong people like $180 a month for 2-channel isdn, nailed
up (on all the time) with a small group of static ip addresses. Keep in mind
isdn allowed the end user to do the first home networks, unlike modem dialup
which pretty much was one computer/one connection, most terminal adapters on
the consumer side are like today's routers from at&t/comcast, minus the
wireless.

As far as the person with the voice-over-isdn but analog dialup, yeah
doesn't see like good use of the circuit but it's possible whatever they
were calling into just didn't support isdn. It's also possible the voice
stuff was also being used for conference calls or even primitive video
calling, I think that was the only to do either in the early/mid 90's
without involving expensive phone company services. 

Keep in mind, I'd think the top reason for isdn in the early/mid 90's was
"high fidelity" sound quality. Those were about the only way radio stations
did remote broadcasts that didn't sound like they were on a phone. And since
you just dialed in to somewhere, it didn't matter if the remote broadcast
was 3 miles away from the studio or 3000.

Just saying isdn had other purposes than being used for a data line.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com