Re: How the IPnG effort was started

Thus spake "Kai Henningsen" <kaih(_at_)khms(_dot_)westfalen(_dot_)de>
> stephen(_at_)sprunk(_dot_)org (Stephen Sprunk)  wrote on 20.11.04 in 
> <004201c4cf22$768a7680$6801a8c0(_at_)stephen>:
> ISTR that the local competition (the one who's laying down cables like
> crazy, pretty much every time a street is dug up)
That's also a major difference; our local competition re-uses the cable 
plant of the incumbent carrier.  Streets being torn up is largely due to 
long-haul carriers (which mostly lay their own fiber, or swap strands on 
different routes) putting new fiber down; nobody here lays new copper when 
there's old copper still available.
> started with offering ISDN *only* (not sure if they ever changed).
Interesting.  Deregulation of the local market here happened after ISDN was 
dead and DSL was starting to appear.
> Anyway, back when ISDN was rolled out, I was under the impression that the
> US generally had digital exchanges, and Germany still had lots of pre-
> digital ones - tone dialling was only just becoming available and
> certainly not everywhere, whereas from what I heard pulse dialling in the
> US was essentially dead for a good while. (I have never heard that you can
> do Caller ID on analog lines over here, either. People who want that use
> ISDN.)
Digital switches had been added long before digital lines were available to 
customers; the two had little to do with each other.  However, one can still 
find a rural exchange here or there that has an analog switch.
Caller ID, Call Waiting, Three-Way and other "extra services" were added to 
POTS lines here quickly after ISDN was available or even at the same time, 
so there was little incentive for non-data users to switch to ISDN at all.
The failure of ISDN was mostly due to the tariffs not being comparable to 
two POTS lines since it was viewed as primarily a "data" service.  However, 
even where it was "available" and people tried to order it, telcos found 
that loads, amplifiers, taps, and other analog cruft had been added to far 
more lines than commonly thought and getting a pair "conditioned" for ISDN 
use took much time and money.  DSL succeeded largely because it doesn't 
require conditioned lines (or new phones for the voice part) or changes to 
the switch linecards.
> So this says to me that the rollout of the basics here was *later* than in
> the US - not earlier.
>
> But I also remember many tales of woe about battling ISDN standards in the
> US, and every phone company having their incompatible own. Possibly that
> had quite a bit to do with the differing results ...
It was that each switch vendor had their own signalling, and which you 
needed to configure your equipment for depended on the particular switch 
used in your exchange.  The NI-1 (for BRI) and NI-2 (for PRI) standards came 
much later, long after ISDN was effectively dead.
> No, I don't think it was a question of monopoly. Rather, it looks a lot
> like the good old OS/2 marketing problem - you *can* market a technology
> to death.
I don't recall ISDN _ever_ being marketed to consumers here; if it was, it 
ended before the early 90s when I got into telecom.  BRIs did (and still 
does) see a fair amount of use in businesses for WAN backups, and PRIs have 
finally taken over for voice trunks, though CT1s are still in widespread use 
since they're cheaper.
> > Whereas here an ISDN line still costs at least twice as much as two 
> > analog
> > lines, plus often carries per-minute tolls even for local calls which are
> > toll-free with analog.
> Well, ours aren't toll-free either way.
Ah.  Most (all?) US POTS lines have free local calling within their 
exchange, usually to neighboring exchanges, and in many states (each 
regulates differently) across entire cities.  ISDN subscribers pay tolls for 
"data" calls and sometimes even "voice" calls regardless of distance, though 
that may have changed recently in some areas.  Long-distance toll rates were 
also typically higher for ISDN calls, even voice ones, for reasons I've 
never been able to figure out -- it's a single channel either way.
> My general impression is that nobody in the phone company business here
> likes providing POTS.
Well, our telcos have tens of millions of POTS linecards already purchased, 
so why would they scrap all that equipment and convert customers to ISDN for 
no perceived benefit to either party?  Perhaps if we hadn't already recently 
converted from analog to digital switches (before ISDN was available), the 
conversion would have been less expensive.
Trends show nobody likes buying POTS here either; mobile phones are rapidly 
becoming the primary phone system, and VoIP over broadband is seing 
explosive growth for those who aren't ready to give up a landline.  POTS is 
finally dying -- we're just skipping the ISDN step for something better.
> I should perhaps add that as far as I can tell, the vast majority of DSL
> is via phone (pretty much none per tv cable - for some reason, that
> business never got off the ground here despite regulatory pressure to do
> so), and the first offers I can recall were as add-on to ISDN. I believe
> it was quite a while before it was offered as add-on to POTS, too.
It was originally designed as an add-on to POTS here, and I'm not sure it's 
even possible to add ADSL onto an ISDN line.  The latter seems pointless, as 
the only advantage of ISDN over POTS is data rate, and DSL blows both of 
them away.
S

Stephen Sprunk         "God does not play dice."  --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723         "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS        dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking 

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