anybody have experience with this outfit?

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2005, Michael Hipp wrote:
>Matthew Carpenter wrote:
>
>>I'm still using ISDN at my house because we don't have cable/dsl 
>>available.  My company would probably cover Satellite for me.  I'm not 
>>saying I'd be significantly less happy with satellite.  At least I'd 
>>have fast download speeds.  But since there are negatives both ways, I'd 
>>rather have full-network capabilities.  At least I know what slow-speeds 
>>are (ok, sorry to those of you who are still doing dialup).
>
>I had ISDN at my house for 2+ years before the satellite. It was costing 
>me $196/month so I installed the satellite to save money. Big mistake. 
>Other than raw download speed the ISDN was superior in every way. ISDN 
>is probably a dying technology (at least in the U.S.) but it is a high 
>quality business grade of service.

We still have a couple of ISDN lines here, and each ISDN line costs about
the same as two business voice lines (about $85/month including all the
graft taken by the Legal Looters).  We're currently using them with Ascend
Pipelines, and have modems attached to their POTS ports so they can handle
either IDSN digital or analog calls.

One advantage of ISDN is that it's available at longer distances from the
telco central office (CO) than DSL.  We're about five miles from the QWest
CO, so DSL isn't an option.  This is pretty close to the maximum distance
for ISDN.  Another advantage of ISDN compared to DSL is that they generally
have higher service level support so get fixed faster if there are
problems.

For higher speeds, T1 or Fractional T1 is available over much longer
distances as the telco installs midspan repeaters.  The cost is
significantly higher than ISDN or DSL just for data service, but I've often
seen the total cost for a business drop when they install one T1 that will
handle their voice lines, and split out two or more DS0s for data.  A T1
requires two pairs, and uses time multiplexing to divide the signal into 24
DS0s of 64k each.  A single T1 can support 24 voice lines or up to 1.54
megabyts of data, in any combination required.

There's another option on the two-pair circuits, Primary Rate Interface
(PRI).  This is a fully digital circuit that uses one of the DS0s for
control, and 23 for data lines.  Many ISPs have dialup concentrators that
take one or more PRIs splitting them out to take incoming calls which may
be either analog or ISDN depending on what equipment makes the connection.

Bill
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