On 5/21/2022 12:36 PM, Bill Horne wrote:
On 5/19/2022 9:05, Bill Horne wrote:
I was talking to an old friend yesterday, and he told me that he's...
been working from home for a while now, and the conversation turned to >>>ISDN phone service, which I recommend to anyone who can still obtain >>>it.
1. Which states still have tariffs for ISDN BRI lines?
ISDN Basic Rate Interface (BRI) is generally no longer available in
the US. Verizon and I think ATT long ago gave formal notice of
discontinuance or grandfathering. Maybe Qwest, pre-Century, didn't
bother, so it may still be on the books there. But few know how to
provision it. Many of the switches that provided it (mainly 5ESS and
DMS-100 in the US) no longer are in service. It was useful, especially
for broadcasters doing remote feeds. It was better than a modem for
Internet access, and that's what killed it as it was coming out in the
early 1990s -- the Bells hated the Internet, which broke their
locality-based business model, and while they couldn't attack modem
users per se, they could at least attack the most obvious Internet
user group, non-Centrex ISDN BRI users. Bell Atlantic l/k/a Verizon
was also fanatical in those days about selling Centrex, and saw ISDN
BRI as a tool for Centrex feature phones, but that was about it. That business has faded out too.
On 5/19/2022 9:05, Bill Horne wrote:
I was talking to an old friend yesterday, and he told me that he's...
been working from home for a while now, and the conversation turned to
ISDN phone service, which I recommend to anyone who can still obtain
it.
1. Which states still have tariffs for ISDN BRI lines?
When I investigated, I quickly found out that almost all of the
T-Carrier systems connecting the central office to its Tandems were not equipped for "8 bit clean" connections. In other words, the connections
from the CO to Tandem offices were designed for the original T-Carrier "robbed bit" signalling paradigm, and were not capable of delivering
64Kbps data connections.
...
ISDN Basic Rate Interface (BRI) is generally no longer available in
the US. Verizon and I think ATT long ago gave formal notice of
discontinuance or grandfathering. Maybe Qwest, pre-Century, didn't
bother, so it may still be on the books there. But few know how to
provision it. Many of the switches that provided it (mainly 5ESS
and DMS-100 in the US) no longer are in service. It was useful,
especially for broadcasters doing remote feeds. It was better than
a modem for Internet access, and that's what killed it as it was
coming out in the early 1990s -- the Bells hated the Internet,
which broke their locality-based business model, and while they
couldn't attack modem users per se, they could at least attack the
most obvious Internet user group, non-Centrex ISDN BRI users. Bell
Atlantic l/k/a Verizon was also fanatical in those days about
selling Centrex, and saw ISDN BRI as a tool for Centrex feature
phones, but that was about it. That business has faded out too.
I don't often disagree with Fred on issues like ISDN, but I'm going to advance a different theory: I had a chance to test an ISDN line at my
home near Boston, back around 1994 or so, and I was /very/ surprised to
find that getting a 64Kbps connection on either of the "Bearer"
channels was very difficult.
It turned out that the only solution was to redial several times, and
sooner or later I'd get a 64Kbps connection. After 15 or 20 minutes of dialing and redialing, I might end up with two 64Kbps "Bearer"
connections to The Well, an ISP which served ISDN customers, and I
could bind them together to obtain a 128 Kbps Internet connection.
When I investigated, I quickly found out that almost all of the
T-Carrier systems connecting the central office to its Tandems were
not equipped for "8 bit clean" connections. In other words, the
connections from the CO to Tandem offices were designed for the
original T-Carrier "robbed bit" signalling paradigm, and were not
capable of delivering 64Kbps data connections.
I think Verizon - and probably the other Baby Bells - wanted to avoid
the expense of retraining a unionized workforce to make use of the 8-bit-clean fiber-optic channels just being introduced at the
time. The company would have had to retrain not only the "CO"
technicians, but also the provisioning specialists responsible for
specifying the number and type of trunks for each CO to use for each
service. Even though ISDN data calls were billed per-minute, the
accountants most likely projected more cost than revenue.
The 64-kbit data bearer service was, as you note, not widely
available. For it to work, both the transmission systems and the
switching systems needed to implement the B8ZS fix to the T1 carrier
system specification.
For some reason, "DOSBS" (Data Over Speech Bearer Service) was a taboo >subject by 1994: the ISP's that supported ISDN connections all
pretended that they had never heard of it, and "bonding," even with 56
Kbps *DATA* calls, was likewise a mystery.
In article <O8SdnfjNCtEMEhP_nZ2dnUU7-LHNnZ2d@giganews.com>,
Doug McIntyre <merlyn@dork.geeks.org> wrote:
We always did 128k bonded connections with no issues. No mystery
here. The biggest problem was the customer equipment. Most of it
sucked hard.
In the early part of my career, I supported ISDN connections for staff
and faculty in my lab. This was before widespread cable ISP access
and overbuilding, but Bell Atlantic (as then was) had a special tariff
that allowed universities to get unmetered ISDN BRI lines installed at employees' homes. We used Ascend equipment to terminate a PRI in our building, which also supported model dial-up. Normally we'd use a
smaller Ascend box (smaller than my current cable modem!) on the
residential end, and we'd configure it to nail up both B channels 24x7
and give each user a subnet.
On 5/19/2022 9:05, Bill Horne wrote:
I was talking to an old friend yesterday, and he told me that
he's been working from home for a while now, and the conversation
turned to > >>>ISDN phone service, which I recommend to anyone
who can still obtain it.
1. Which states still have tariffs for ISDN BRI lines?
ISDN Basic Rate Interface (BRI) is generally no longer available in the US. Verizon and I think ATT long ago gave formal notice of discontinuance or grandfathering. Maybe Qwest, pre-Century, didn't bother, so it may still be on the books there. But few know how to provision it. Many of the switches that provided it (mainly 5ESS and DMS-100 in the US) no longer are in service. It was useful, especially for broadcasters doing remote feeds. It was better than a modem for Internet access, and that's what killed it as it was coming out in the early 1990s -- the Bells hated the Internet, which broke their locality-based business model, and while they couldn't attack modem users per se, they could at least attack the most obvious Internet
user group, non-Centrex ISDN BRI users.
Bell Atlantic l/k/a Verizon was also fanatical in those days about
selling Centrex, and saw ISDN BRI as a tool for Centrex feature
phones, but that was about it. That business has faded out too.
ISDN Primary Rate Interface (PRI), which runs over a DS-1 ("T1") channel, is still out there, though again its number are in decline. It is a very good trunk interface for PBX systems, and many different 1995-2010 vintage switching systems support it, as it handled the dial-up era's modem pools. But most newer systems use SIP trunks instead. PRI has higher quality of service than SIP/RTP/IP, but the industry has moved away from it, as the higher-volume IP services usually have a lower price tag.
Why would the bells hate the Internet?
To be sure, their business model was built around central offices
which each served a rate center, but how could they have predicted
and/or anticipated the development of VoIP? Did Mother Bell see /any/
data transmission method as a threat? Why?
I wonder why? What was so different between the business models of
the 1990's and those of the 2020's that Centrex would no longer
be a cost-saver for firms which chose to use it?
Granted, the Coronavirus has caused a reexamination of work-at-home as
a viable real-estate strategy, but I think the /time/ spent on dialing, connecting, and suffering with the shortcomings of cellular calls,
like picket-fencing, fading, disconnecting, and - last but far from
least - being easily tapped by anyone with an antenna ana a few items
of listening equipment.
I'm afraid comparing IP-based telephony to ISDN PRI links is the
ultimate race-to-the-bottom in voice communicaiton. As far as I can
tell, the only thing that makes SIP or VoIP or /any/ Internet-based
real-time service - don't forget streaming video - viable is a surplus
of bandwidth which will, inevitably, decline as paid-prioritization
methods and equpment take hold.
On 22 May 2022 12:11:50 -0400, Fred Goldstein wrote:
IT was better than a modem for Internet access, and that's what killed it as it
was coming out in the early 1990s -- the Bells hated the Internet, which
broke their locality-based business model, and while they couldn't attack
modem users per se, they could at least attack the most obvious Internet
user group, non-Centrex ISDN BRI users.
Why would the bells hate the Internet?
I wonder why? What was so different between the business models of the
1990's and those of the 2020's that Centrex would no longer be a
cost-saver for firms which chose to use it?
I'm going to have to descend from whatever foothold I used to have on
Mount Olympus, and admit that I don't understand how you could "nail
up" two bearer channels without disabling the ISDN line's capability
to carry phone calls.
We always did 128k bonded connections with no issues. No mystery here.
The biggest problem was the customer equipment. Most of it sucked
hard.
Why would the bells hate the Internet? To be sure, their business
model was built around central offices which each served a rate
center, but how could they have predicted and/or anticipated the
development of VoIP?
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