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Message-ID: <t70rq1$1lmo$1@gal.iecc.com> Date: 29 May 2022 22:24:01 -0000 From: "John Levine" <johnl@taugh.com> Subject: Re: ISDN's days are numbered: What should you do? According to Bill Horne <malassQRMimilation@gmail.com>: > 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? No per minute charges (other than what they could try to get for ISDN calls), no separations, no "value" pricing. It totally broke their business model. This was way before VoIP, they wanted data to pay by the minute too. >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? Phone switches have gotten a lot cheaper, wires haven't. Putting a PBX in the customer's office is a lot cheaper than running every extension back to the CO. I realize there were versions of Centrex that put the switch on the client's premises but now it's just an expensive telco managed PBX. R's, John -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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Message-ID: <76e86bf9-9825-2b81-d08d-20f378420539@panix.com> Date: 30 May 2022 08:50:07 -0400 From: "David" <wb8foz@panix.com> Subject: ISDN's days are numbered: What should you do? First, my source was a VZ employee who accepted their buyout offer to reduce manpower, and left. Second, the charges he mentioned are the ongoing application software (called a "Generic") license fees on a 5ESS. The operating companies didn't just pay WECO to buy the hardware, they also had stiff ?monthly/yearly? license fees to use the 5ESS Generic that made them work. > Why would the bells hate the Internet? The Bell's were welded to their "If only we can charge local calls by the minute, it would be great..." thinking. They hated dialup, be it POTS or ISDN, because it shredded their predicted call durations, utilization of switch resources and interoffice trunkage. People like me would make one 9c call, and leave it up. I had calls that would stay up for 999 hours before my router would drop the call when it reached 1000. PLUS: Ma Bell had anticipated that CLEC-fed businesses would call LEC-served residences. Under Her insistence, the originating {C}LEC would pay the terminating {C}LEC compensation per minute. But the ISP's, soon tired of dealing with LEC's unwilling/unable to make large dial-in modem pools function, switched to CLEC's who would help them. So instead of an income stream, it was a huge drain. Fred Goldstein can likely comment on the ensuing legal fights. Centrex: I don't know if is less popular it is now than it was, but in the DC region, it was a major LEC income stream. The reason is only the tiniest USGovt agency fits into one building; most are spread out between many, often scattered between DC, MD & VA locations. Centrex gave them 4 or 5 digit calling between all their offices. Further, ISDN Centrex gave the boss a fancy feature phone with many buttons, vs. a POTS 2500 set.

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Message-ID: <t70pm2$sm3$1@tncsrv09.home.tnetconsulting.net> Date: 29 May 2022 15:47:59 -0600 From: "Grant Taylor" <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> Subject: Re: ISDN's days are numbered: What should you do? On 5/29/22 2:51 PM, Bill Horne wrote: > Why would the bells hate the Internet? I don't /know/ why. But I have a few speculations: - Not Invented Here (bells) - Bells tended to be EXTREMELY /circuit/ switched, which is diametrically opposed to /packet/ switched. - Bet on the wrong horse. - Had to double down on any of the above. > 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 think it would be rather naive to think that /nobody/ saw the possibility of the Internet making things over a disparate distance equal cost to access vs the distance based billing of local vs long distance. > 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 don't know of /any/ /single/ ILEC employee ever talking about Centrex. I think they had decided that Centrex was an unwanted step child by the 2000s when I was working on phone systems (PBXs / KSUs / ""Smart (read: dumb) phones / multi-line POTS). If I had known about Centrex and the pricing would have been acceptable, I probably would have done more with 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 don't do enough on cell to be able to comment. But I can say that my recent messing with ISDN vs POTS in my house, the call connection speed of ISDN is -- in a word -- /amazing/ to me compared to POTS. > 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. I think that VoIP /across/ /the/ /Internet/ is a questionable idea at best. I also think that VoIP technology across the LAN is a very good technology. Especially if you have the LAN switches that can isolate & prioritize VoIP. With this in mind, both ISDN PRI and VoIP are communications protocols which imply an underlying network. The former seems to be a vertical market while the latter seems to be used ~> abused for anything and everything. I'm aware of some larger SIP trunks, which have supplanted ISDN PRI trunks, that are using dedicated access circuits. As such the dedication means that there will always be sufficient bandwidth. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

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Message-ID: <t70r27$qd5$1@usenet.csail.mit.edu> Date: 29 May 2022 22:11:19 -0000 From: "Garrett Wollman" <wollman@bimajority.org> Subject: Re: ISDN's days are numbered: What should you do? In article <20220529192147.GA29678@telecom.csail.mit.edu>, Bill Horne <malQRMassimilation@gmail.com> wrote: >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 did not provide staff members' voice service, only the data connection to our lab. When the ISDN service ended, it was convenient for those of us who switched to CLEC ADSL to have that extra known-clean pair to our homes; folks who were trying to run ADSL on top of an existing unbundled ILEC voice circuit had a much harder time with installation and a great deal of finger-pointing between the two carriers. (Of course now we all have our Internet connectivity via DOCSIS, and much of this region -- although not Cambridge -- has three competing facilities-based carriers, Comcast, RCN, and Verizon FiOS.) -GAWollman --

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Message-ID: <t6ra8k$1d3l$1@usenet.csail.mit.edu> Date: 27 May 2022 19:53:56 -0000 From: "Garrett Wollman" <wollman@bimajority.org> Subject: Re: ISDN's days are numbered: What should you do? 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. We were still doing this in 2001 when I bought my condo, so I was probably one of the only residential ISDN customers in my town. The special rate was detariffed around 2003 so I had the former ISDN pair ported to Speakeasy for ADSL service. Shortly thereafter, we made the decision to stop supporting our own dial-in and retired the PRI and modems. (It took only a few years after that to get to the point where employees were simply expected to pay for their own Internet connectivity, rather than getting reimbursed for it -- likewise cell phones.) -GAWollman -- Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can, wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together." my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015) ***** Moderator's Note ***** My apologies to Garrett: this was supposed to have been published last week, but it got stuck in a holding file for some reason. Bill Horne Moderator

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