Yup; the Internet is screwed up.

Max Pierson nmaxpierson at gmail.com
Sat Jun 11 14:09:02 UTC 2011


>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 at hiwaay.net> wrote:

> 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.
>
>



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