Yup; the Internet is screwed up.

Chris Adams cmadams at hiwaay.net
Sat Jun 11 05:54:48 UTC 2011


Once upon a time, Jeroen van Aart <jeroen at 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 at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.




More information about the NANOG mailing list