Sure its old and slow, but it is or at least was readily available to use poor country folk that cannot get DSL and so forth. The failback positions when all else is unavailable is analog, ISDN, or T1 from a landline, satellite or a WISP through the air with cellular data becoming more of an option. When I called AT&T to order the ISDN line years ago, their answer was - Huh, What, Do we sell that. -----Original Message----- From: Barry Shein [mailto:bzs@world.std.com] Sent: Sunday, June 12, 2011 1:03 PM To: Jon Lewis Cc: NANOG list Subject: Re: Yup; the Internet is screwed up. On June 11, 2011 at 20:53 jlewis@lewis.org (Jon Lewis) wrote:
Have you heard the joke...ISDN = I Still Don't kNow? For whatever
reason, > BRI service is something the US telcos apparently never really wanted to > sell...perhaps because it might have cut into their T1 business. FWIW, ISDN is pretty old, standardized in 1988 but worked on for years before that. The BIG VISION of the telcos was that ISDN would carry the whole stack, particularly services like (business) e-mail. If you're really old you remember MCI Mail which was like 20c/message. They never seriously considered a public internet like we got when architecting ISDN. Consequently the whole thing was just too expensive to deliver as a last-mile connectivity-only product. They needed revenue from the rest of the stack to make it profitable. That said, ISDN was very cool in that it was switched which meant you "dialed" something, a lot like a POTS number. It was usually an actual POTS telephone number with some more digits but whatever. But it could establish a connection in about 50msec which meant you could be dropped, say for idle, hit a key and it'd redial and you'd never notice you were dropped. Try that with POTS dial-up! You could pretty much be dropped and redialed between keystrokes and never much notice. More importantly it meant you could have more than one ISDN "ISP", like dial-up (or voice for that matter) just "dial" a different number. There was discussion, people like Sen Ed Markey of MA was interested (ca 1992?), in trying to get the phone companies to embrace first ISDN (they were reluctant, I had it at home but you really had to know how to order it etc) and then some sort of next generation ISDN which would be faster, maybe 10x, and so on. The attraction of DSL was, among other things, that it was nailed down to one and only one service provider, you couldn't just "dial" some other provider like with ISDN. This was a very important fork in the history of last-mile services, when we went from mostly switched (dial-up, maybe ISDN) to nailed-up single vendor solutions. I'd love to see some sort of "switched" last-mile services again, introduce some competition into the system, tho most likely it'd be (more) virtual over some low-level broadband service. -- -Barry Shein The World | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool & Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*