I launched RustNet in 1992 as "the first ISDN ISP in Michigan." We offered a blindingly fast internet speed of 125k! At the time Silicon Graphics had added an ISDN port to its latest workstation, which I had for the engineering design work we did. The launch of our ISP occurred at an industrial expo at Cobo Hall in Detroit. We were not set up yet so I talked to the product manager of the ISDN feature at SGI and he was kind enough to let me dial into his desktop workstation in his office. All I needed was to get Ameritech to drop an ISDN line into Cobo Hall.
One trick we learned: if a regular dial-up customer complained about speeds we would call Ameritech to schedule that customer for ISDN. The phone company would remove something from the line (filter? impedance?) to prepare it for ISDN. Then we would cancel the order and the customer would get the full 56k from their modem.
Ahh, good ol’ pair gain, where the ILEC would basically share one circuit between 2 houses. Saves money from not having to run a second circuit, plus the sound quality isn’t too awful as long as you’re deaf.
I also worked at an ISP. Customers would sometimes call to complain about how much we must suck because their shiny new 56k modem wouldn’t train up past 28.8, and it couldn’t possibly be on their end because they lived in a neighborhood of brand new McMansions. That’s when we had the diplomatic mission of explaining how Ma Bell saved a whole lot of money at the expense of the customer’s phone quality.
As long as we’re swapping horror stories, I can summarize another one in 1 word:
We're going to need a PTSD trigger warning on this thread if we keep this up.
Did residential dial up support from 95-00, and got to experience all those disasters.
Another fun one is when you serve at the edge of two different phone companies and they didn't have enough cross connect service between the two for all the long running dial up connections. Yea, your modem banks aren't full, but your customers are getting busy signals.
That still happens on the internet, just in a different layer - between Autonomous Systems:
You’re a content provider serving at the edge of two different providers and they didn’t have enough cross connect between the two for all the required bandwidth. Yea, your connection and servers are underutilized, but customers are getting timeouts.
Memories! An old job bulk-bought a ton of cheap "home" PCs (Compaq Presario) to use as Citrix desktop clients; the included modem was a winmodem. We discovered the CPU in the PCs couldn't reliably run the Citrix software and maintain a modem connection at the same time. We ended up having to buy external modems (and later network cards) for all the presarios.
Thankfully we learned from the experience and stuck purchasing from the "business" product lines after that.
Ouch, LOL! There were so many tech support calls about such things. "I paid a good $30 for this new 56k modem, and I still can't download more than 2KBps when the screen saver kicks in. You guys suck!" "Did you get that from the shelf next to the $200 USR modems?" "I did. Those are rip-offs!" "Mmm-hmm."
Is this really why I could never go past 28.8k? I was 16 at that time, always wondered why - and experienced this in a few different homes until we switched to DSL.
It's very possible, especially if you lived in even a slightly rural-ish setting, like outside the city proper. There are so many reasons that could cause it, though. If you could hear any crackle or hissing during voice phone calls, that would be enough line noise to force a lower speed train-up.
I worked for the first commercial ISP in Hungary in 1995. At the time phone lines were still a hot commodity -- it takes a bit of time to fix decades of neglect, after all (Hungary was a Soviet satellite until 1989 and the wait time for a landline was ~ten years in the 80s). So supply side for lines was low and prices were high. On the other hand, the potential income for the ISP was limited because, well, it's 1995, not many people or businesses even know what Internet is good for. So how on earth did they afford the necessary many lines?
Well, see, they didn't. The guys running the place got wind of a CO in an older district in Budapest has excess capacity so they rented a flat next to the CO and drilled the wall. Presto! Plenty phone lines without installation costs.
I had ISDN in Southeast Michigan (bit north of Mt. Clemens) back in the late 90s and it was amazing. Being local, your stoy really caught my ear. I wonder about that timing, though, because 56K modems weren't available in '92. They didn't get to be a thing that people could buy until '97 or so, IIRC.
(I worked retail computer support at the time, and USRobotics did a neat sales presentation at Henry Ford Manor where, if we went to an "educational" session about the technology, we got a free modem. I already had ISDN by that time so I didn't really need it, but it was still neat. And a couple-hundred-dollar modem, for free, for a retail employee seemed like quite a perk.)
Prepping a pair for ISDN could involve removing load coils (very common in more rural areas) or “designing” the pair by removing bridged taps. Both of these actions improved the quality of the facility.
Also, if the facility ran through a pair gain system (or subscriber loop carrier) a reprovisioning onto a different card could be massively beneficial. I have fond recollections of the areas in rural Maine where the SLC mode kept my customers well below the maximum theoretical capability of their 56K modems, causing the normal complaints. Dialup was fun!
I had one of those between my home and my office. It worked great for about 6 months until it stopped working entirely. No support was available because the only supported signaling was the closing of a relay. The phone company seemed to be searching out likely alarm circuit data use and putting filters on them to force an upgrade to a data circuit. (USWest/QWest)
Didn't see the same with SBC/ATT [1] in the Chicago burbs mid 90s fortunately. Even got a tour of the central office by walking up to the door as an early teen and asking to look around. Different times.
There were a couple of us around here who had the alarm circuit hack for DSL until Bellsouth finally figured out how to make it impossible to order. It was never easy, but (I assume) neglect of the systems, changes in tariffing and oversight, and BS not wanting to sell it finally let them get away with not provisioning the service without explicitly saying 'no'.
Back then we had four primary rate connections 2.048MBit/s each (30 ISDN B channel) to transmit data to several subsidiaries. This was quite a lot of bandwidth at the time.
Our litte on demand network started at 02:00 in the night when tariff was lower (paid by connection time, not by volume :D) and used Ascend and Cisco routers
Ascend was always much quicker setting up MPPP channel and therefor preferred, but Ciscos where a bit better utilizing larger 30 channel MPPP connections (and some destinations preferred Cisco)
It was quite 'fun', because starting with morning when tariff changed everything had to be transmitted and if something didn't work out right (to slow buildup of the MPPP channel, delay in the batch jobs delivering the data) someone had to monitor the process in the next night to prevent further backlog.
For a long time there was only a 64kBit (later 128kBit) connection over the day regular connectivity.
Eight MBit carefully distributed over 120 channel. With all the support equipment a server rack, filled by 2/3.
Ridiculously little today, even over air. It sounds as if one talks about the ancient Egyptians, but it is only 25 ago
I thought primary rate interfaces were 24 channels (23 bearer channels plus one data channel) for a total throughput rate of 1.5 Mb/s, but apparently that’s only the case in the US, Canada, and Japan. European PRIs (E1 vs T1) are as you described. TIL.
ISDN did have multiple channels, in Germany you would get two data channels (B1 and B2-channel, 64 kB/s), and the line has a D-channel (something like 4kB/s) for network purposes. First you could bundle the B-channels to get twice the speed, at twice the price and the land line was busy if one did that. That feature got me into trouble with my parents quite regularly.
Second someone figured out that the D-channel can also be used to send data to arbitrary endpoints in the phone networks and dropped a messenger app on a Friday afternoon in '98 or thereabout. That was a pretty fun weekend, unfortunately the hack had stopped working when I came back from school on Monday.
Oh yes, the D channel, holy grail of always-on dreams. Young me spent countless hours staring at AVM header files dreaming of finding an angle that would enable me to sneak free bytes to a friend who also had ISDN.
I did my training at Deutsche Telekom, and our instructors told us a story of an ISP that tried to sell a flatrate working over the D-channel; apparently they had some reliability issues and did not last long. That must have been in 2003 or early 2004, by then of course DSL had arrived and rendered such experiments (and ISDN in general) more or less pointless.
Same here in the Netherlands, somewhere between 1998-1999 using KPN Telecom. I was in high school and convinced my parents to upgrade from single-line PSTN to dual-line ISDN, so we could call and surf the internet at the same time. At the start of 1999, because of the rapid increase in phone and internet traffic, the national call tariffs had been reduced a lot[1]. Tariffs were even cheaper in the afternoon and during the weekend.
For normal internet browsing the single ISDN connection (64 kbps) was enough. Then later in 1999, Napster[2] launched and I was hooked! This made me use bundling ISDN channels quite a lot. Because of the cheaper tariffs, weekends where great because I enabled the bundling around midnight until early in the morning, so my parents wouldn't notice. :-)
I was on ISDN until 2002, when ADSL was available here and we could be online 24/7 for a fixed price. I do remember my ISP (XS4ALL) still had a fair-use-policy for downloading, which they removed a few years later.
When we first got Internet at home (also Germany), it was ISDN, but only single channel. So being connected meant not being reachable by phone. That meant my mom strictly limited our Internet access to 1-2 hours a day. I was so glad when we finally got that second channel :D
The article addresses the big miscalculation by the telecoms, as I see it, though somewhat obliquely.
In the telecom world, the telecom was the network. If you wanted to exchange data with someone, you placed a call to someone directly. Everything was envisioned as some form of point to point session between subscribers. Whatever it was, it was one subscriber contacting another. The telecoms didn’t really conceive of what would become the Internet as we think of it now. As far as they were concerned, the Internet didn’t provide anything the telecoms couldn’t offer—and bill for.
They were caught flat footed when customers started dialing up ISPs and cutting the telecoms out of the loop. If you wanted Internet, you got ISDN, but you used it to call an ISP that was not the phone company.
Not that the telecoms weren’t visionary — they largely foresaw everything we do today. They just assumed they would continue to be the sole provider of those services. They built a network with that in mind.
And then we all went and built our own network on top of that.
They scrambled to try to charge us for using our voice lines for data, and then they managed to slide DSL onto the rate card, and ultimately became actual ISPs.
But that wasn’t the future ISDN was built for. It wasn’t built for a world where an ISP was even a thing. It was built for a world where everything we now do on The Internet would show up as a line item on a bill from AT&T.
I worked at an ISDN adapter company in the late 1990s. Apparently, one customer a couple of years earlier did use ISDN as their LAN technology. Each PC with an adaptor (to the joy of my employer, this customer was not small), using the PBX as network switch. I have no idea what software they used. Probably some CAPI-based file transfer. The extended version of that, using ATM-based BISDN, was the telcos' vision of networking.
Imagine if instead of resolving a name to an IP address, it resolved to a phone number. Loading any modern webpage would take a week of dialing to fetch all the ads and trackers.
Telcos actually realized that dream in cellular networks. Tons of scams followed with random webservers automagically charging your wireless plan for "services"
> Imagine if instead of resolving a name to an IP address, it resolved to a phone number. Loading any modern webpage would take a week of dialing to fetch all the ads and trackers.
Got ISDN as a previous job as parttime helpdesk employee at an ISP. Together with the rise of numberous dail-up providers, including the legendary Superweb. It would allow free internet against a fix rate, not paying per minute, which was something new for the Netherlands. It would only allow one or two hours after it would disconnect you and you had to redial. Due their succes getting dialed in again could take quite long (too many users, not enough lines). So I wrote code/script and made changes to the Linux distribution to allow me to dial with my second line as part of my ISDN, starting ten minutes before I would get disconnected, and “transfer” the connection to the new connection when it was finally able to dial-in, hence having internet 24hours a day. Good times! Superweb didn’t exist very long…
it was shell-scripting (bash). And i'm not sure, but it i think i was mandrake linux distro. It was quite the work to get ISDN working properly, especially to use two lines at a time (one dialing, while the other one was in use).
Before ADSL was available and affordable, I did have ISDN at my place.
It was charged by the minute, so I could not leave the data always on.
I set up an always on Linux box at my apartment with a PCI ISDN adapter. A voice mail application answered calls on one of the 4 ISDN phone numbers.
I modified this voice mail application to accept a PIN code to open PPP on the other B-channel to the ISP and read back the dynamic assigned IP on the phone. This was something I could not do with a single analog phone line and a modem.
This was not the reason to get the ISDN, but this was the first time I could remotely access my systems at home at will. Not that I needed to that much, but I could.
Back around 1996 I was working for a non-profit rural digital project in Devon, Southwest England, called Project COSMIC. If I recall correctly there were 2 main types of ISDN in the UK at that time (a) on-demand, which was similar to dial-up, and needed an ISDN modem, or (b) leased line ISDN which was always on 24x7 and terminated in a Router. I was lucky enough at COSMIC to have access to a 64 Kbit/s ISDN leased line. As I recall it was insanely expensive, I think it was about £16,000 / year in 1996, and that doesn't include the initial install cost where they had to drag a cable across the fields and install poles.
On the end of COSMIC's leased line, after the Bay Area Networks router, we had a simple Ethernet Hub, a Windows NT 4.0 Server, and several Windows 95 desktops. We used IIS to serve websites and email for customers from the NT server, and all the machines had public IP addresses without a firewall - the Internet was a different place back then!
A few years later ~1999 they upgraded to a 128 Kbit/s ISDN leased line, I think costs had decreased and the additional capacity did not cause a large jump in price. It was brilliant! Many games of Quake were hosted ;-)
Later in around 2004 I worked for a company that had a leased line, but they used an entirely different technology - LES10 (10 Mbit/s) - but it had a range limitation and so you had to be within perhaps 10 KM of your ISP.
Of course, just before that, around 2000/2001 some parts of the UK started to get ADSL trial role-outs. I was lucky enough to be at University in one of the first areas (Derby), and we were able to get a 1 Mbit/s connection for about £50 / month which we shared between 5 of us in our student house. After that I didn't see ISDN around much, and LES10 was a pretty niche use-case anyway.
Today I am happily sat on the end of a 100 Mbit/s consumer microwave connection for about €30 / month.
That would have been Kilostream which wasn't part of the ISDN system. Kilostream pre-dated ISDN. The reason for its high cost was that you could throw as much data as you wanted to 24hrs a day and it was a point to point dedicated circuit, i.e. you couldn't "dial up" different locations the way you could with ISDN.
@teh_klev That's interesting. I thought I also remembered the DSU being branded with BT ISDN logo, but perhaps I am mistaken, it was a long time ago now!
I had ISDN in South Africa for a while back in the day.
Aside from the higher throughput, one of the other great things about it compared to analogue dial-up modems was the almost instant connection speed while old analogue took tens of seconds, maybe even a minute.
But the biggest thing that really made it feel “responsive” was its digital nature, meaning that your baseline latency was mere sub-10 milliseconds instead of 150ms for analogue.
Generally our monopoly telco was despised, but they had a great offer called “R7 weekend” where from 7PM Friday to 7AM Monday, no matter how long the (domestic, possibly local, only of course) call you would never be charged more than R7 for it. This meant that you could be connected for the whole weekend at 128kbps for R14 (~1.4 USD) at the time (2003-ish).
Yep, that latency thing was a huge deal to Quake(World) players back in the day. ISDN really did give a big (some would say unfair) advantage over "dialup lamers", and gaming was probably one of the main reasons for investing (or maybe more commonly, begging your parents to invest) in ISDN.
Another advantage I don’t think the article mentioned was, of course, the ability for others in the household to use the regular phone while you were online, removing a common source of intra-family conflicts. In the end, though, consumer ISDN remained a transitionary technology and most people skipped straight to DSL or cable.
We used to play Quakeworld and later Team Fortress after hours at our office. A networking consultancy. Where we went through dedicated T1s, multimegabit SMDS on to metro ethernet. We were the LPBs and got accused of cheating constantly, which was kinda true.
Do you know if Telkom offered ISDN around ‘95 thru to ‘01?
My parents had “two lines” back then so we could always have access to the Internet, even while talking on the phone. I recall, vaguely, using dial up but we may have had an ISDN line. In part, because my Dad wanted to order LaserDiscs from the US while my Mom was chatting away to family.
My main exposure to ISDN in Australia was in radio stations.
In Australia, we had an ISDN2 product (BRI) which gave us that 128Kbps bitstream. Hardware boxes from brands like Musicam Prima, Tieline and Comrex would allow transmitting a bi-directional MPEG2 audio stream. When I used to dial these things, you’d hear a low-bitrate stream first for a few seconds before the 2nd number would dial and you’d get that full 128Kbps. Different brands of codecs were theoretically interoperable, subject to the settings and codecs matching. I remember the Tieline codecs probably sounded best because they had their ‘MusicPlus’ codec (which I think was actually AAC+ under the hood). But most other codecs were only MPEG2, so you were stuck with that.
We used to use these for outside broadcasts, backup links between the studios and transmitter site, and links to other broadcasters (e.g. the TV news presenter dialing in to tease the nightly news headlines).
Even after the internet was well and truly established, ISDN was still used a lot for this because it was ‘standardised’ and also a pretty much guaranteed bitrate - whereas ADSL might give you a couple of megabits but with no guarantee you’d have that between your two locations at all times. When you need low latency two way conversations, you can’t just dial up the latency and keep re-transmitting packets until they arrive.
The local telco used to be able to install these fairly easily on a temporary basis so you could do a broadcast from a temporary location (e.g. local advertiser books a broadcast at their store). You couldn’t really get a temporary internet connection put in at the time. You could get stereo audio both directions, but often you’d use the left channel for your program audio, and the right channel for an intercom in everyone’s earpieces. So long as you played the music from the studios and just fed the mics down the ISDN from the remote location, the quality was passable.
We also had ISDN10/20/30 (PRI) for general telephony. I interfaced these to SIP PABX’s a few times with Patton boxes, but the docs were always for T1 not our E1.
I don’t really miss it, but it’s kinda cool in retrospect.
On the ISP side, ISDN was a crucial part of scaling out dial-up ISPs. CLECs (Bay Baby Bells) would route calls from geographically large calling areas --- all of Chicago, say --- to a single colo cage on an ISDN PRI. Access concentrators (then called "terminal servers" --- Portmasters, Ascend routers, Cisco AS5x00s) would take 56k modem calls on individual PRI channels.
minor point, the Baby Bells were incumbents in the market and were referred to as ILECs. they were mandated to lease their infrastructure to CLECs at reasonable rates to allow for competition.
incidentally, there were many terminal servers that didn't require authentication, or would accept default credentials. this was a common way to get free internet access back in the day!
Incidentally, The Serial Port on YouTube (no affiliation) is doing an excellent series on old-school ISPs, getting hands-on with the equipment to set up their own ISP.
Here in Australia, ISDN Data over Voice (DoV) was in fairly common use. Telstra (the major telecom here particularly in those days) charged an untimed flat "local call" rate (a few tens of cents) for an ISDN voice call, and by the minute for an ISDN data call. It didn't take many minutes for a voice call to be vastly cheaper.
At a technical level both types of call are a 64kbps data connection, with just a flag to discriminate between the two. All the major suppliers (Cisco, Nortel, ...) had software options for their ISDN gateways to tell them to set the voice flag when making an outgoing data connection, and to treat voice calls as data calls when they were received.
This was extremely common and Telstra never seemed to do anything about it. Just a funny memory that this article brought to mind.
I remember visiting relatives in Switzerland in the 90s and it was the first time I’d seen ISDN - felt like they were living in the future while we were still on dialup in the US. I was thinking earlier today how when I was that age how amazing it would be to have fiber someday - has taken 25 years but I finally have it at home, and it still isn’t fast or reliable enough
ISDN was widely available in the US (it ran on the same copper pairs you already had) but was never all that popular. You could essentially _always_ get it deployed and it was the base-level connectivity back in the 90s for remote sites. I had it installed in a few crappy apartments much to the confusion of the local installers, the line price wasn't crazy expensive but finding a local ISP that would agree to reasonable always-on pricing was more challenging.
Then we had two very different lived experiences - my parents couldn’t get it in the Seattle area, I couldn’t get it where I was going to college in the midwest, and what I recall was that it was very expensive, like double the cost or more, or any available dial-up option.
In the Southeast, you could get it but it took some more or less annoying negotiating with Bellsouth bureaucracy, usually had install issues because the residential installers didn't do it that often, and it was way more than double the cost of dialup. There were plenty of ISPs.
This was similar to my experience in SE Michigan & NW Ohio in the late '90s to early '00s. Ameritech required you to order 2 ISDN phone lines, which cost somewhere around $80 per month, each. ISPs charged extra for the ISDN services, too.
Serbia (former Yugoslavia) was mostly in turmoil in the 90s, and while I did get online using dial-up in 1995, new tech was (very) slow to arrive: I used ISDN for a few short years in early 2000s before ADSL finally arrived. It was amazingly reliable even in Serbia.
But compared to the regular 20V phone line, ISDN used something like 120V (which I learned by carelessly changing the connector like I used to on the regular phones), and in a country where power went out regularly, I wondered how much power could I get out of it for emergency situations.
Ma Bell used -48v DC in the US, which was backed by a giant lead acid battery at the local exchange. It was quite common to have ADSL circuits working during major power outages, so long as the modem and servers were on redundant power. It might still be worth coming up with a USB charger circuit, but I assume current draw is metered.
I’ve seen COTS adapters which connect to a standard phone jack with pass through and provide one USB port, advertised as an emergency/backup power. I don’t know how much power they can draw, however.
The one I’m familiar with is called:
VR3 (brand) Phone Jack Powered Emergency Night Light & Charger (model: PJNL-USB)
in the mid-90s it was often the only option for >14.4kbps internet in residential areas. unfortunately the tariffs charged by the minute for voice and data calls so it was prohibitively expensive (at least for our household).
the hack (in the US) was that ISDN was often offered as part of "centrex" service which was a sort of phone company managed PBX-as-a-service offering. so rather than businesses setting up their own local mini telephone switch (a PBX) that they'd hang all their extension phones off of, they'd just get ISDN phones and connect directly to the phone company and have the phone company manage it all. the trick was that "intercom" calls within a centrex were unmetered (think intra-office calling), so an approach to building an ISP would have been to sign up for centrex service and then install a branch phone on that centrex at each customer site, then all calls into the ISP would be intercom calls and would be subject to unmetered tariff.
i used to drool over the idea of one day getting my hands on an ascend pipeline 50 and its sweet, sweet 128kbps of bandwidth. then one day i finagled a visit to a local software company and met the founder who was struggling with getting one working (it was paired with one in his home, so he could make use of the company's t1). he jokingly offered that if i could get it working he'd offer me a job: 45 minutes later the link was up and few hours after that i was shaking hands with the head of engineering as they made good on the founder's word. fun times!
Interesting. v.34 ratified in 1994 supported 33.6 kbit/s. In at least some areas POTS calls to local prefixes were unmetered. ISDN BRI had similar, if not identical, tariff.
i guess you're right about 33.6kbps... point stands, if you wanted to go faster than analog modems in residential settings, before DSL and DOCSIS, ISDN was often the only game in town.
BRI did not have free local calling with pacific bell at the time and "local long distance" or metered within NPA calling was quite expensive- often times a lot more expensive than actual long distance calling.
The 56k modem was a quasi-digital connection and as I recall asymmetric.
xDSL (there were so many flavors) was a disappointment in some areas in comparison to ISDN for reasons I do not recall, but I think it had to do with the fact that it often shared the copper with POTS. xDSL on former ISDN lines or in buildings wired for xDSL was far more performant. DOCSIS was generally good.
Also, modems and ISDN, owing to their switched nature, could be used to connect to services other than the Internet. xDSL and especially DOCSIS was Internet only AFAIR.
> The 56k modem was a quasi-digital connection and as I recall asymmetric.
ahh yeah i forgot about that. the other side was direct digital and often ISDN PRI. ascend (or what was left after lucent bought them) made a device called the portmaster 3 that had a two port PRI and an ethernet port. it was an all in one 56k dialin modem bank, SLIP/PPP endpoint and router that would provide ~26 dialup lines with just a few cables.
i believe the way it worked was that it spoke digitally to the customers local C/O and then would do the DAC for the downstream channel with the shortest possible local loop allowing for more aggressive trades of reliability for bandwidth. it was all transparent to the customer though, they'd just buy a 56k modem and plug it into a POTS line.
Many fond memories from using ISDN, but there was also some frustration. How far you were from the Central Office played a critical role on whether you could get ISDN and I was at the limit. Ended up switching equipment more than once trying to find the perfect device that could deal with whatever signal issues came from being around 15,000 wire feet from the CO.
Haven't seen much mentioned about it but as I recall ISDN was also symmetrical vs analog modems which had a small back channel. Equal upload speed made it easy to keep up with sites that enforced a sharing ratio.
ISDN also exposed the call setup information sort of like caller ID did on analog lines, but it came over the control channel instead of between ring one and ring two on a Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) line. Some ISDN devices had call handling that was pretty sophisticated - a precursor to Asterix and like software/customer managed PBXs. The upshot was you could screen and reject calls prior to their tying up one of your channels. And if you did want to take a voice call, you could take one channel down and still have a 64k network connection going while your wife used the other to talk to her sister. Huge wife acceptance factor vs "Don't pick up the phone, I'm using the computer!"
The condo I'm living in (in Tokyo) was built 20 or so years ago and features a karaoke room for the residents. We recently got a notice about how they will have to do a full makeover of the karaoke system because the current one only works with ISDN and the vendor is phasing out support. IIRC the quote for the makeover was around $10k
In the late 90s, I lived in rural Appalachia and had terrible pings with lots of packet loss on my 56k modem. Found a local ISDN provider and my parents paid to have the ISDN line installed into my bedroom.
I was in heaven! Now I could play Action Quake 2 and Quake 3 Arena without glitching all the time! Those were good times :)
I love all the anecdotes here. The mid-90s were a time of the creation, explosive growth, and decline and fall of the Internet Service Provider industry. Like many other people here, apparently, it was a big part of my life. I worked at three nascent ISPs, the third of which I started with a friend from college, and it was where I learned a ton about networking, sysadmin (FreeBSD), software development, handling customers, etc., that turned out to be foundational to my career decades later.
And I did have ISDN at my house for a time. (Bonded, blazing 128k!) We used the Centrex trick that was mentioned elsewhere in the comments.
Right at the start of the 2000s DayJob had ISDN (initially using one channel then the two bonded for 128kbit), and while it was night and day compared to the unreliable 42/21¹ I got at home from a nominally 56k connection², it wasn't all that impressive compared to what I was used to at university in terms of throughput most³ of the time.
Admittedly the office was well out of town making a "proper" leased line extortionately expensive, so ISDN was the best practical option until we moved.
----
[1] or 33k6 when I forced it to use that standard to get the faster upstream rate
[2] always on, fixed addresses, faster, didn't drop if a sparrow farted nearby, …
[3] the link we had there did get over-contended at times, but not as much as you might think as this was before connections were available on dorms so Pele had to head to a computer room to get online so if I did get lower than ISDN performance it was likely due to the other end or peering limitations between
At the end of the century, 1999, I had one of the first and also one of the last ISDN internet flatrates, offered here in Germany. It cost around 60 Deutsche Mark per month. Around year 2000 this ISDN flatrate became obsolete, because DSL was pushed into the market, also with a flatrate option. Now you could get 786kbit/s instead of 64kbit/s. :) I used my (and my only one) ISDN telephone to 2017 though. It lasted almost 20 years without any problems. Then we moved and now it is all VoIP.
We are still using our ISDN phone behind a FritzBox DSL Router. S0 Bus still works nicely and is much easier to setup compared to multiple VoIP phones in your house. Particularly supporting multiple phone numbers is nice. Actually all our phones we use are pre 2000s. The newer ones we had never lasted both in terms of design and tech. I think at work our Alcatel phone system also uses a modified version of the s0 bus (with numbers tied to the port )
ISDN was the gold standard after the 56k modem time. Low latency included, which was very nice for online gaming. It lasted for a while but then DSL came around the corner and it was game over for ISDN.
I must have had the same flatrate provider: Sonnet, I believe it was named.
It had perfect timing: starting in the market when I was fresh out of school and doing civil service as conscious objector, meaning I had a little bit of money to splurge for an ISDN flatrate at my parents house and it cancelled its ISDN flatrate tariff in fall 2000, when I moved out into my own little apartment and got T-DSL.
For me it was the feeling of "being on the internet" that made ISDN so special. My computer had a fixed IP address, a name in DNS and the router at work had of course dial-out, so I could telnet into it from anywhere on the planet, authenticated with the same Kerberos tickets that got me in at work.
I remember connecting my laptop to ISDN public phones in Tokyo in the early 2000s to check my email when I was away from my office. Not a particularly fond memory, but it gave me an early taste of the always-connected world we live in now.
The phones apparently still exist [1] but the digital data function is being phased out [2].
I had ISDN back in 1996 and it was great. It felt dramatically faster than a 56k modem because ISDN has much lower latency. Web pages were so simple in those days they loaded almost instantly.
I remember that back in the xDSL days we had never-ending discussions about interleaving vs fast-path. If you could enable fast-path, you could reduce your latency in half, but not all ISP supported it and your connection would be more sensitive to noise and errors, so it was not always worth it.
Upstream mattered a lot for responsiveness. This was really before the idea of ACK Prioritization [1] TCP connections, so the standard small upstream of 56K had an impact that didn't quite get felt as much as it did on symmetric ISDN.
Most things silently incorporate ACK prioritization now, which makes the typical asymmetric internet connection like a cable modem work better. But before then, it was a problem... And those of us who hand-solved it on DIY firewalls really reaped the rewards.
That brings back fond memories. In high school (a long time ago), I coded up a client-server application in Perl/Delphi to utilize the ISDN D-channel to transmit small amounts of data by repeatedly dialing a destination, using the call initiation metadata to communicate, and then hanging up before the call got established.
In Europe at that time, every call (even local ones) started getting billed as soon as the dialed party picked up. So effectively, this allowed for fee-less small applications that didn't need much data, but that I wanted to invoke many times a day (think checking email, checking server status, IM, etc).
ISDN absolutely was exhilarating “technology from the future” during the 90s and even into ~2000 era just before general cable/DSL proliferation.
It usually just worked consistently and at unbelievably high data rates vs theoretical “56k” even on 64kbit/s single channel. Meaning basically 2x IRL downloads vs 56k at usually tenable full hop bandwidth of constant 8kb/s.
I kept being mesmerized by “just the basics” of ISDN + TCP/IP; it all was working just so flawlessly. For years on end, and each time I went online. Pure wonder and amazement.
ISDN was a great upgrade for me in the 1990s, and once I found out how to couple two lines into one "massive" 128k, it was pretty mind blowing. Connecting to the Internet was also snappy (as opposed to dialup with the whole modem song) and could even be done on demand if you were brave.
Well, it wasn't actually 128k. Technical reasons limited it to 112k. That's why 56k instead of 64k modems. There was the Shotgun Modem which required 2 separate phone lines, but would bind them together. I never bothered reading up on how binding 2 PPP connections worked, but I guess it worked well enough that it was a legit product being sold. I went from 28.8k to ISDN, so I skipped the 56k altogether.
Of course, ISDN and 2 56K connections are only similar in bitrate and are not the same thing at all.
> Well, it wasn't actually 128k. Technical reasons limited it to 112k. That's why 56k instead of 64k modems.
That’s not fundamentally true about ISDN - in North America, at least, most basic rate connections and every single PRI I ever encountered had eight-bit-clean channels and were true 64kbps.
With modems (I assume you mean analog modems,) that was only part of the reason. There were others that would have been far more difficult to solve in practice, and there was largely no point in doiny so as xDSL technologies came around at roughly the same time.
Multilink PPP worked quite well, even beyond bonding two channels.
You're right the BRI was actually 144k, 2x64k B channels and 1x16k D channel. 112k was available on misconfigured hardware and gimped bit-robbing lines where some of the bits on the B channels were used for signaling in lieu of a D channel.
Yeah I think the binding of the lines was much easier with ISDN as one never went through the analog level (except if you want to be really pedantic). It was digital from the ISDN adapter. No ringtone etc.
Believe it was 1995 or '96. We had 20 remote sites connected with "128K" ISDN connections. There were a pair of PRIs at our main data center. Ascend PRI router (concentrator?) on one end, Ascend ISDN boxes at the remote site. (IRC, Ascend was formed by former Hayes modem engineers). Occasionally there would be issues bringing up a site and I would be invited (allowed?) into the Telco Central Office to troubleshoot. Standard ISDN troubleshooting tools were a laptop, a portable sniffer (Toshiba laptop with 96K of memory and Network General Ethernet adapter), a BERT tester and, occasionally an oscilloscope. For the more difficult sessions I would work with a remote Anixter engineer (before they were bought and screwed up by SBC) who was a veritable rocket scientist. We'd been running clean for a couple of years, and I was on vacation at Disney Florida with my wife and small children when I got the call that one of our supervisors had somehow managed to wipe the configs on the PRI boxes. I spent the next two hours on a bench under the Epcot ball walking one of our best desktop people through reconfiguring the boxes from memory. I do not miss ISDN, 56/64K, T-1, T-3, SONET. Currently running on privately owned fiber and never want to go back.
Obligatory reference — electronica legends the Future Sound of London (FSOL) [1] produced an album called "ISDN" that was originally broadcast over ISDN lines in 1994:
It's an interesting relic of a specific cultural moment in time just before the Internet broke through. With ISDN, you could send a nearly hi-fi quality digital audio stream to anywhere in the world, but it wasn't yet on the open network that would define the actual future we now live in. Quite fitting for a band with "future" in their name.
- -
[1] Even if you don't know FSOL by name, you've most likely heard their massive 1991 club hit "Papua New Guinea" somewhere.
Great album, BTW, one of my favorite. You can kinda hear this cultural moment in the music itself: Some of the sounds they use are rather primitive by modern standards. But other parts are really complex and nuanced.
So you get some sense of a transition of digital technology from novelty into mainstream.
You also get a cyberpunk vibe, a lot of it is dark and harsh, but at the same time organic and beautiful. It's not as abstract like Autechre's music, this is definitely about humans, but in a weird environment.
Was glad to see some facts about using ISDN for voice acting in there. When I was a teen, my interests were split between computers and theater. I was SHOCKED when I found out some of the actors I got to work with had ISDN, and not for internet!
Still use it, and there isn’t really a replacement at the price point or reliability. When all you need is a single voice circuit for a radio station to be able to contribute from the middle of nowhere, it fits the bill very well.
Obviously it’s going (how soon? Well we will see shortly if 2025 is kept to), and it will be a sad day. International isdn is pretty much dead, and has been for some years, but in the U.K. it is still reliable and functional.
| The problem with ISDN was simple: We already had effective options for everything it was trying to do
Man, can't disagree more. I didn't become aware of ISDN until I was using a 14.4k modem for a dialup internet connection, and the idea of having an always-on "digital" connection to the internet that was almost 10 times as fast as what I had was absolutely, unfathomably futuristic.
It seemed like the kind of thing they only had in Europe and Japan though. I was aware that some people in the US had it, but I had no idea how it was delivered or how one would go about getting it.
In the end, we were super late to getting DSL -- I think maybe 1999 or thereabouts, long after most neighborhoods near me had it. Going from 33.6k to 256kbps was the biggest "real" jump in internet speeds I've ever had, to this day.
By comparison, going to a shared LAN on a college campus, or a 10Mbps cable connection, to 25Mbps, to 100MBps, or whatever series of jumps got me to 250Mbps and beyond were barely noticeable from a user experience standpoint. Yes, files downloaded faster, but it didn't "feel" faster in normal interactive use.
Hell, I only got gigabit fiber "because I could" and the jump from 1 gig to 10 gig symmetric is almost laughable because it's impossible to use anywhere near that much speed on a day to day basis.
ISDN was a true gamechanger for me. Before that, we had a 56k modem and I couldn't go online without blocking my parents' phone connection. Also, with ISDN came our first internet flatrate.
The 10m long cable runs across the hallway from the living room to the children's room. What a time to be alive :D Blocking the phone connection for 1 hour to download the 10MB demo of a game.
I used ISDL, a related technology based on ISDN operating at the same bandwidth, for a few years in Colorado in the early 2000's. It was the only thing better than dialup at the time. The ISP was Megapath Networks. Still have the Efficient 5871 IDSL modem somewhere.
Always on, static IP address. It was easily the most reliable service I have ever used, then or since. The latency was astonishingly low as well. But 128Kbps wasn't adequate and I moved on when I could.
Man, the idea that ISDN was going to last 50 years has to be one of the bleakest Bellhead memes I think I've ever heard. "You will only have 144kbps and be happy."
It's a service framework for subscriber based circuit switched connections. The modulation format is separate and I doubt they expected to keep such a meager encoding for the long predicted life of the network.
The error was in not seeing packed switched networks as the clear winner not in choosing a modulation scheme that was designed to bring maximum bandwidth over existing copper infrastructure.
In any case, the strength was that you could bond up to 24 channels in a North American PRI package, which is what a lot of businesses considered their "T1" service, or used as a mixed group of DID and LOOP channels for calling.
Interestingly, in the end, they used bonded ADSL to provide an encapsulated 24 port PRI "circuit" to the customer using just 4 wires.
Actually, it was envisioned that you'd use the D channel for packet switched data traffic (not IP, more like X.25). Why would a private person use more than 16 kbit/s for a home computer? Much more important to have two high-quality voice lines! And we are busily working on ATM-based Broadband-ISDN to even make high quality video calls and TV available! Just you wait!
I've been using ISDN in Italy in the late 90's at home and it was great... Many didn't know its potential, but even the fact I could use a router that connected to both lines and automatically dropped one once a call was mad or coming, made my life way better...
And before ADSL become a thing, having a 128k symmetric digital connection with low ping was a dream!
My folks and I moved to a town outside Naples in 2000 and had a 128kbs symmetric ISDN. I remember it being fantastic. A huge upgrade from our 56k in the states at time of nascent Napster and online gaming.
A place I worked in the early 2000s had ISDN. They had two telephones and two channels for the internet. There was this sweet period around that time before broadband was ubiquitous where websites were still lean enough to load instantly on an ISDN connection. We've regressed a lot since then and now even Google doesn't load that quickly.
In my CCNA training in 2007ish we actually got to use an ISDN simulator of some sort. It was a large physical box. I think you can buy them on eBay still.
Pretty sure this is no longer on the CCNA unfortunately. Maybe just a small mention.
I find it much more amazing that T1 dates back to 1962. What could talk at 1.5mbps in 1962? Mainframes I guess?
Then there’s the fact that this speed remained fairly state or the art until DSL and then cable modems.
There was also T3 in the 1990s for a whopping 45mbps. I worked for a bit for an ISP in Cincinnati in college that had one of those running to a data center. That DC was full of racks of Windows NT machines with unused mice hanging off the back of each so they would boot properly.
Those days were both fun and awful. It was really a frontier feeling but the tech was clunky and connectivity was expensive.
One really cool thing about ISDN was that it connected almost instantaneously (within a second). In fact I remember the first time I used it, I thought the connection had failed because I could not imagine it connected so fast. This allowed you to have the illusion of being always online by auto dialing just in time. I remember setting up modemd (IIRC) to keep the connection open for at least the minumum charge time of my telco provider. This was in NL some time in the 90s.
I was lucky enough to have a grandfathered flat-rate ISDN in my apartment in ~94-97. I had one of those Motorola BitSurfr modems, and would keep it up to my ISP with 128Kbps, but if a phone call came in it would drop one so I had 64K and could talk on the phone. Invariably, these calls were people looking to post adverts in the Thrifty Nickel paper. My number was close to theirs.
I ended up staying in a small apartment for a couple of years rather than moving to a bigger, nicer one, because moving would have caused me to lose my flat rate ISDN and instead have to pay by the minute.
Being done with waiting for two modems to sniff each-others butts like a couple of dogs was liberating!
I moved to a house in 1997 and went back to modems. But I started consulting with an ISP and they offered to let me connect a T1 from my house to their network. I got a contract from the phone company for $205/mo, and got the T1 installed. They charged me $250, and after a few months of me calling them about it they said their tariff wouldn't allow them to sell it for $205, the contract was a mistake.
That was a few days after I got a flier advertising DSL: half the speed but a quarter the price. But a lot of speculation that "DSL will never work". However, it did, and it was great.
Back at that time the primary concern about screwing up DSL was cross-talk: "Once more than a few people in your neighborhood have DSL, the cross-talk between lines will brick everyone." There was a lot of hate, not sure exactly where it came from.
We networked our nerd house in the early/mid 90s, using an ISDN terminal to get that blazing fast 128kbps. Back then, people weren't constantly streaming video, so most of the time when you were downloading stuff (kernel source, Linux distros, funet.fi, sunsite.unc.edu, etc.) you got the whole 128k to yourself.
Most people at the phone company had no idea what ISDN was, so it took a while to find a technician there who could get up provisioned, etc.
Before we lived together my wife moved into a flat and got a landline so she could get online. The phone company installed an ISDN line, great. But when they installed it they never properly explained it to her, so she was using her 56k modem on the ISDN line! I visited and saw how she was connecting, I then showed her that by plugging in the USB connection on the ISDN TA, she could get faster speed and a quicker connection. I don't think she used 128k, but single channel 64k was still a big step up for no extra cost.
I had an ISDN line in my home that, somehow, had a direct connection to the intranet of my employer at the time, Infoseek. Not sure how this was all arranged, but it was just like having a very long wire that went to my employer. Someone in Infoseek's IT department set it up.
Sometime after, DSL replaced this. And I used some form of DSL until, eventually, cable modems became cheap and fast and available in my area.
ISDN was somewhat mandatory in Germany for internet access during the 90th. Carriers pushed it very hard.
The combination of both channels was a unique selling position to leave modem speed in the dust. 64kbps could be combined to 128kbps simultaneous download speed - of course, it costs you twice as much. ;)
The downside later on was, that it took a long time till the next generation was available, in Germany it was DSL.
I have a conspiracy why it was so popular in Austria and Germany: ISDN had an official matching translation to German: Integriertes Sprach- und Datennetz
The love for ISDN was absurd. In Germany they even rolled out slower DSL services for a while to keep ISDN alive (ASDL-over-ISDN).
What was great about ISDN is that it started the trend of flat rates in some places. As you kept the modem connected 24/7 you could still do phone calls. I’m not sure we would have seen flat rates as quickly without it. Latency also was amazing compared to 56k. For online gaming it felt amazing.
//edit: one interesting memory I had was that upgrading from ISDN to DSL would wreck latency. Most ISPs thus gave you to option to disable interleaving to improve latency for online play.
ISDN was quite popular (albeit expensive) in the Netherlands. I remember enviously watching at a friends house how you could connect instantly without dialling up and how 64k was significantly faster than “56k”. Then we bundled the lines to get 128k and went onto Napster. Boom!
Widespread, I guess in completely new construction maybe. AT&T in particular has proven they care nearly not at all to roll out their fiber product to residential, even when they were still stubbornly doing FTTN out of cheapness.
I’m still sad that Google pulled the plug on investment in Google Fiber. The only thing that could possibly have egged American telcos on enough to build a real network.
dual challenge ISDN was a reason I was trying to move into a Roseville Telephone (Northern California) area. at the time, it was awesome. web pages were like flipping pages in a book. the latency was nice and low for the time.
I used ISDN internet for a few years in the 90s before DSL became available. It was a big improvement over normal dial-up because you could still use the phone while online. Or use two lines for 128kb downloads if you weren't expecting a phone call.
I have quite fond memories of working on ISDN video conferencing in the not so distant past. Video calls are quite possible on 64kbps (qcif, g728 and h264). Though it was also possible to use a whole PRI and make a call using 2Mbps.
I had an ADSL connection in France in the late 90s. It did not do bonding of the 2B channels so was limited to 64kbps, but the latency was much better than with a modem so it felt much snappier.
I had it between a 27k modem and ADSL. It was amazing, 64k and my family could still use the phone, and at night I could fly with nothing less than 128k. Great times!
Frame Relay was horrible, and the bane of our existence at the ISP.
We had a wide variety of customer connections, from dialup to an honest-to-God 14.4Kbps digital leased line, to 56K and T-1 leased lines and some T-3s in our backbone.
Our manager was a huge proponent of SMDS; in fact the SMDS diagrams made liberal use of the "cloud" icon to depict connections going in and out of the telco's switched network. He was able to derive great reliability and value from SMDS connections, and they were probably our fastest links available.
By contrast, Frame Relay was some sort of a hack to avoid having a "real" 56K line run to a customer, and they went down all the time. They were so unreliable, we could hardly stand it. The FR customers became quite disgruntled.
This was in the mid-90s. I don't know if FR improved after that time or got a better reputation elsewhere. But we would definitely rather not have it around.
FR was problematic because the FR networks were oversubscribed, which was actually one of the benefits of the technology. The tech support for FR was also lackluster at best. The nice thing about FR was that you could aggregate multiple connections on one piece of equipment and pay based on usage rather than committed bandwidth.
The over-subscription was definitely a problem. The ISP I worked for had a fractional T1 in their main POP for frame relay (512K or something?) There was about 4 to 5x in bandwidth needed for customer connections, assuming 100% utilization. During peak times in the evening, the FR was massively overloaded and ping times would get into the 100's of milliseconds (normally it was 10 to 15ms IIRC.) The connection never went down though, even when they were slow.
I had 56k FR at home in the 90’s. I worked for an ISP and it was a perk offered to some employees. The connection never went down once in 4+ years. The reliability must have depended on your LEC.
I spent a long number of years frustrated by analog dialup as I read stories about ISDN being used in places that like Europe.
But for a brief time just before the turn of the century, it made sense to get ISDN at home (in the US).
I already had a free 24x7 dialup account from a local ISP that I'd done some work for (the free lifetime account was part of my pay for a job).
And the local phone company was circulating mailers for ISDN circuits -- installed for free, and with a very low monthly rate, and with unmetered local calls.
So I asked my ISP buddies if it'd be OK, and they said sure, but asked that I keep the channel count low unless I was really using it.
It worked great.
I was able to set up my (ZyXEL) all-in-one ISDN router to keep one B channel connected at all times, and to connect the second B channel only when average bandwidth utilization required it.
The ZyXEL box also had two POTS jacks for connecting telephones. One of them was used for the house landline, and the other was connected to an analog modem for BBS duties.
The circuit had two phone numbers assigned, and either POTS port could use either B channel.
It worked slick: Always-on, low-latency internet that got faster on demand (connecting the second channel and logging it in took only a fraction of a second), with a static IP and customized reverse DNS.
And the dedicated POTS jacks worked great: These provided the highest quality telephone calls I had ever heard.
Management was automatic: Inbound calls would drop a B channel automatically if that was needed, and so would placing an outbound call.
It all happened transparently, thanks to a combination of software at all ends (my end, the phone company end, and the ISP end) with MLPPP running the show in IP land.
A beautiful symphony of weird telephony tricks, all working in time to be useful and reliable.
And I do not know if it was common, but my particular circuit was provisioned so as to allow me to specify any number I wanted for caller ID purposes.
So on outbound calls, I could change my Caller ID to any number I wished.
I never used this function for personal gain, but I could, for instance, call up a friend's place and have their mom's phone number (and name, due to how CID works) show up on Caller ID.
"Hey, yo. I'm totally at your mom's house right now. What? No, it is like that. No, she's sleeping right now -- you know how it is."
"Except: Just kidding. I'm at home by myself as usual, and just fucking around with my ISDN line because I have no life. But that was a neat trick, wasn't it?"
This was my experience too. I was looking for something better than the 56k modem, but ISDN was 10 times as expensive and like 20% faster.
In the end I was stuck on modem until DSL finally rolled out in my area. One thing I miss about DSL was that it was open. You had your choice of several competing ISPs that offered service over the same lines. You could get some very nice fast service with lots of features for cheap. Locally run Usenet servers. Free web hosting. Free terminal server. Free Email. Static IP addresses. All the stuff that the monopolies don't offer anymore.
Fwiw open access fiber systems have that now. In Utah you can actually subscribe to multiple ISPs over Utopia fiber, and it's mostly just an issue of configuring your terminal to talk to them.
Since it's a 100% eithernet network, any off the shelf device with an SFP cage can connect to it
That would be nice. My local fiber option is Verizon or nothing. Verizon's tech works very well, but their customer service is terrible. Many people think that Verizon only pushed FiOS as hard as they did because it gave them a way to push out the competitors they had on DSL. Once DSL died off so did their drive to deploy FiOS.
Extremely affordable in my area at the time, due to massive subsidies from the former government telco, to push it to the masses.
Also the only solution from private telcos at around the same time, where said former gov telco simply wouldn't offer early DSL at all, while private upstart offered ISDN whith dynamic channel bundling at flat rated 29,99 per month, so 128Kbs! Yay!
Since it was pushed so hard by subsidies, many had it, the equipment was cheap, and the sound quality that came with it was rather good. Often still unmatched by some crap which people accept as 'normal' nowadays.
