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.
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!