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