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 l

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.