Also, the telcos generally made getting a BRI difficult to impossible. An early string of Dilbert cartoons covered Dilbert's attempts to get ISDN at his house, and IIRC they were based on Scott Adams' real-life attempts (and this was either when or shortly after he worked for the phone company).
I live in Huntsville, AL, and we supposedly were one of the first cities in BellSouth territory (if not the US) to have ISDN available at essentially every address.
LOL, I actually remember that one. Dilbert and Calvin & Hobbs, great way to pass the time when I had it. I'm in former BS territory myself, and as soon as they started deploying Alcatel 1000's in most of the CO's here in the south, there was a mass exodus from B channels to ADSL. Most businesses couldn't justify a $90 circuit charge from them and on top of that, $200 per B channel dedicated from us (CLEC/ISP), when we resold ADSL for $59 a month. In some cases, we were able to order 2 or 4 wires and put the customer on our own DSLAM's if they were < 15k feet from the CO (or at least no less than -6db). However, there are still places I know of today that can't even get B channels, forget about any other digital services. I don't believe that we've ordered an ISDN 128k circuit in quite some time, but I would imagine that at&t would make it very difficult to do so as their policies now pretty much put T1's in the same category as a standard POTS line as far as turn around time on a trouble ticket. A sad state to say the least :( -- m On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 12:54 AM, Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net> wrote:
Once upon a time, Jeroen van Aart <jeroen@mompl.net> said:
I wonder, what's wrong with dialup through ISDN? You get speed that is about the same as low end broadband I'd say. And I think it'd be available at these locations where DSL is not.
For the most part, it probably isn't, especially now. Telco front-line support doesn't even know what a BRI is anymore. While POTS lines are largely flat-rate for local access in the US, many telcos put per-minute charges on ISDN BRIs (and that's per-channel-minute, so 128k runs mintes at 2x wall clock time), so the "power users" that wanted higher-than-dialup speeds didn't move to ISDN very fast (because they also wanted to be on line nearly 24x7).
Also, the telcos generally made getting a BRI difficult to impossible. An early string of Dilbert cartoons covered Dilbert's attempts to get ISDN at his house, and IIRC they were based on Scott Adams' real-life attempts (and this was either when or shortly after he worked for the phone company).
I live in Huntsville, AL, and we supposedly were one of the first cities in BellSouth territory (if not the US) to have ISDN available at essentially every address. After a while, it usually wasn't too painful to get a BRI turned up, as long as you didn't want any special configs (such as hunting); when I got mine, it pretty much "just worked". However, the billing was confusing at best; IIRC in the several years I had ISDN service, my bill was never exactly the same amount two consecutive months (and I never had any usage charges, so it wasn't because of that).
-- Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.