6 ms·

That reminds me of my short time with ISDN and the amazing availability to receive calls on the second line without forcing me offline.

by sureIy 2y ago

stuff4ben 2y ago
That 128Kbps on ISDN was the like the gold standard back then! I knew some sysadmins who had that installed to their homes so they could be available at any time. All paid for by the company they worked for.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yes but with channel bundling you also had to pay twice. One channel was only 64k.
- js2 2y ago
  I was one of those SAs, circa 1998-2000. We also had an on-call kit with a Nokia Communicator so we weren't completely stuck at home while on-call. Fast-forward to 2025, and I now have dual 1Gbps symmetric fiber connections (AT&T, GFiber) into my home from opposite sides of the house. (It's totally gratuitous and I'll probably cancel GFiber in a few months, but I wanted to have it wired up so I could more quickly start service in the future.)
- fatnoah 2y ago
  > All paid for by the company they worked for. One of my internships in college was at Sun Microsystems in the org that provided this connectivity to employees. My job was to automate pushing updates to connection software and modem firmware down to clients, but I ended up doing a lot of technical support as well.
- hylaride 2y ago
  Ha! My mom worked as a build engineer at BNR (later Nortel) in the 1990s and we got a free 2nd phone line for her to dial into work (99% used by me and my brother for internet). She could have gotten ISDN had it been available in our small town, but alas...
- shagie 2y ago
  There was also that period of time when Ricochet was available in some places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service) Wireless 56k baud. So you could take your luggable laptop circa 1994 with you and dial in to work... given you lived in SF.
  - royskee 2y ago
    Oh man I forgot about Ricochet. I remember they had service in NYC too, and it turns out also in a few other big markets. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/16/technology/ricochet-network-lived-fast-and-died-young.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/16/technology/ricochet-netwo...
- phil21 2y ago
  The most bang for buck "employee benefit" I ever offered to my guys back in the earl 00's was a T1 line to their home for free. We could do this since local loops to most folks were about $150-200/mo, and we already had a channelized DS3 terminated at our rack at a local datacenter for our phone banks. If you bought your own DS1 retail you'd be paying upwards of $1k/mo back then to a provider. It was by far the best "stickiness for dollar" investment into employee benefits I've ever found back then or since.
  - icedchai 2y ago
    I worked at an ISP that gave dedicated ISDN and 56k frame relay lines as a benefit in the late 90's. T1 would've been amazing!
  - linsomniac 2y ago
    I worked for an ISP back in around '98, and they offered to let me terminate a T1 there if I covered the line. I got a contract from the phone company for $205/mo for the T1 and got it all set up, but they were billing me $250/mo for the line. A couple months in DSL dropped, and I got out of the T1 contract because they said they couldn't honor the contract they wrote because $250/mo was the regulated minimum price, and I got 768K DSL for $70/mo. At the time everyone was speculating that DSL wouldn't work (crosstalk across pairs as multiple people in a bundle use DSL will cause it to fail), but they were quickly proven wrong.
  - wil421 2y ago
    Back in the day people on forums would list T1 line in their signature. My ISDN line was not worthy!
  - badc0ffee 2y ago
    I had 1.5 Mbps DSL in 1999, and I think nearly all of my co-workers either had that or a cable modem with similar speed. I think T1s were like 5x the price for the same download speed.
    - genewitch 2y ago
- calamity_elf 2y ago
  I used to use 128Kbps bonded ISDN at home through BT Home Highway and an ISP called Red Hot Ant who had fixed price unmetered internet access. And I accessed the heck out of that connection (until the ISP went bust, wonder why?), and was very much a Q3A LPB during that time.
- joquarky 2y ago
  I had one for work as well in the late 90s. The other (often overlooked) benefit that ISDN provided was 24/7 connectivity in an age of dialup. Oh and you could spoof your outgoing phone number for caller ID ]:D
xnx 2y ago
I'm still mad that they high-quality voice audio possible through ISDN didn't become ubiquitous. It's ridiculous to hear the clipped frequency range of a plain old telephone line during radio interviews in 2025.
- numpad0 2y ago
  24 [bit] * 192 [kHz] = 4.608 [Mbps]. Maybe not sensible to do so, but many people could have Discord calls in uncompressed "high-res" WAV. It's crazy that there aren't even 16bit/44.1k modes in most voice call apps.
  - OhMeadhbh 2y ago
    The economics probably aren't that great to send uncompressed voice into the data center. If you have a business that gets charged XX cents (or more likely .00XX cents) per GB of traffic and you can cut that in half by using compression... I think people will opt to use compression.
  - smittywerben 2y ago
    You have an eye for quality. They should make an Apple voice dongle for that. Inside joke. Signing off.
  - Synaesthesia 2y ago
    Speech compresses really well, with modern techniques you can get it down a lot. The big issue with analogue landline phone calls is the audio bandwidth is so limited. It's not the full frequency spectrum, most of it it cut off.
    - cosmotic 2y ago
      For some context, wikipedia has a good table and diagram of codecs that do well at low bitrates, many of which are very old (G.722 from the late 1988, Speex from 2003, Opus from 2012 for a few examples) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_coding_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_coding_for... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)#Quality_comparison_and_low-latency_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)#Quality_co...
xenadu02 2y ago
Indeed ISDN was amazing for its time but Ma Bell and her successor ILECs were way too proud of it so in the end it went nowhere and never made them all that much money. If they had gotten out of their own way when the internet came around they could have charged a small monthly fee to upgrade to a "digital phone line". Lots of people would have switched.
Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
As a kid, we didn't have ISDN, but we did have a second phone line dedicated to the modem. My dad ran a BBS from like 1992 to 1995, which started falling out of favor, especially as the users were getting more busy signals because the modem phone line was tied up with the internet connection.
cantrecallmypwd 2y ago
Both our ISP and the phone company charged for every BRI data "call" placed and for minutes connected rather than a flat rate on a business-class ISDN line. I discovered IBM AIX's web browser package contained a telemetry background process that dialed home to Big Blue every 2 hours, causing our Cisco 1604 router to dial-on-demand even when no one was in the office. A simple deny IP ACL fixed that problem. There was no opt-out and no mention of it, and it never became a story that it should've been.

That reminds me of my short time with ISDN and the amazing availability to receive calls on the second line without forcing me offline.

by sureIy 2y ago

That reminds me of my short time with ISDN and the amazing availability to receive calls on the second line without forcing me offline.

stuff4ben 2y ago

That 128Kbps on ISDN was the like the gold standard back then! I knew some sysadmins who had that installed to their homes so they could be available at any time. All paid for by the company they worked for.

wkat4242 2y ago
Yes but with channel bundling you also had to pay twice. One channel was only 64k.
js2 2y ago
I was one of those SAs, circa 1998-2000. We also had an on-call kit with a Nokia Communicator so we weren't completely stuck at home while on-call. Fast-forward to 2025, and I now have dual 1Gbps symmetric fiber connections (AT&T, GFiber) into my home from opposite sides of the house. (It's totally gratuitous and I'll probably cancel GFiber in a few months, but I wanted to have it wired up so I could more quickly start service in the future.)
fatnoah 2y ago
> All paid for by the company they worked for. One of my internships in college was at Sun Microsystems in the org that provided this connectivity to employees. My job was to automate pushing updates to connection software and modem firmware down to clients, but I ended up doing a lot of technical support as well.
hylaride 2y ago
Ha! My mom worked as a build engineer at BNR (later Nortel) in the 1990s and we got a free 2nd phone line for her to dial into work (99% used by me and my brother for internet). She could have gotten ISDN had it been available in our small town, but alas...
shagie 2y ago
There was also that period of time when Ricochet was available in some places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service) Wireless 56k baud. So you could take your luggable laptop circa 1994 with you and dial in to work... given you lived in SF.
- royskee 2y ago
  Oh man I forgot about Ricochet. I remember they had service in NYC too, and it turns out also in a few other big markets. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/16/technology/ricochet-network-lived-fast-and-died-young.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/16/technology/ricochet-netwo...
phil21 2y ago
The most bang for buck "employee benefit" I ever offered to my guys back in the earl 00's was a T1 line to their home for free. We could do this since local loops to most folks were about $150-200/mo, and we already had a channelized DS3 terminated at our rack at a local datacenter for our phone banks. If you bought your own DS1 retail you'd be paying upwards of $1k/mo back then to a provider. It was by far the best "stickiness for dollar" investment into employee benefits I've ever found back then or since.
- icedchai 2y ago
  I worked at an ISP that gave dedicated ISDN and 56k frame relay lines as a benefit in the late 90's. T1 would've been amazing!
- linsomniac 2y ago
  I worked for an ISP back in around '98, and they offered to let me terminate a T1 there if I covered the line. I got a contract from the phone company for $205/mo for the T1 and got it all set up, but they were billing me $250/mo for the line. A couple months in DSL dropped, and I got out of the T1 contract because they said they couldn't honor the contract they wrote because $250/mo was the regulated minimum price, and I got 768K DSL for $70/mo. At the time everyone was speculating that DSL wouldn't work (crosstalk across pairs as multiple people in a bundle use DSL will cause it to fail), but they were quickly proven wrong.
- wil421 2y ago
  Back in the day people on forums would list T1 line in their signature. My ISDN line was not worthy!
- badc0ffee 2y ago
  I had 1.5 Mbps DSL in 1999, and I think nearly all of my co-workers either had that or a cable modem with similar speed. I think T1s were like 5x the price for the same download speed.
  - genewitch 2y ago
calamity_elf 2y ago
I used to use 128Kbps bonded ISDN at home through BT Home Highway and an ISP called Red Hot Ant who had fixed price unmetered internet access. And I accessed the heck out of that connection (until the ISP went bust, wonder why?), and was very much a Q3A LPB during that time.
joquarky 2y ago
I had one for work as well in the late 90s. The other (often overlooked) benefit that ISDN provided was 24/7 connectivity in an age of dialup. Oh and you could spoof your outgoing phone number for caller ID ]:D

xnx 2y ago

I'm still mad that they high-quality voice audio possible through ISDN didn't become ubiquitous. It's ridiculous to hear the clipped frequency range of a plain old telephone line during radio interviews in 2025.

numpad0 2y ago
24 [bit] * 192 [kHz] = 4.608 [Mbps]. Maybe not sensible to do so, but many people could have Discord calls in uncompressed "high-res" WAV. It's crazy that there aren't even 16bit/44.1k modes in most voice call apps.
- OhMeadhbh 2y ago
  The economics probably aren't that great to send uncompressed voice into the data center. If you have a business that gets charged XX cents (or more likely .00XX cents) per GB of traffic and you can cut that in half by using compression... I think people will opt to use compression.
- smittywerben 2y ago
  You have an eye for quality. They should make an Apple voice dongle for that. Inside joke. Signing off.
- Synaesthesia 2y ago
  Speech compresses really well, with modern techniques you can get it down a lot. The big issue with analogue landline phone calls is the audio bandwidth is so limited. It's not the full frequency spectrum, most of it it cut off.
  - cosmotic 2y ago
    For some context, wikipedia has a good table and diagram of codecs that do well at low bitrates, many of which are very old (G.722 from the late 1988, Speex from 2003, Opus from 2012 for a few examples) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_coding_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_coding_for... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)#Quality_comparison_and_low-latency_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)#Quality_co...

xenadu02 2y ago

Indeed ISDN was amazing for its time but Ma Bell and her successor ILECs were way too proud of it so in the end it went nowhere and never made them all that much money. If they had gotten out of their own way when the internet came around they could have charged a small monthly fee to upgrade to a "digital phone line". Lots of people would have switched.

Sohcahtoa82 2y ago

As a kid, we didn't have ISDN, but we did have a second phone line dedicated to the modem. My dad ran a BBS from like 1992 to 1995, which started falling out of favor, especially as the users were getting more busy signals because the modem phone line was tied up with the internet connection.

cantrecallmypwd 2y ago

Both our ISP and the phone company charged for every BRI data "call" placed and for minutes connected rather than a flat rate on a business-class ISDN line. I discovered IBM AIX's web browser package contained a telemetry background process that dialed home to Big Blue every 2 hours, causing our Cisco 1604 router to dial-on-demand even when no one was in the office. A simple deny IP ACL fixed that problem. There was no opt-out and no mention of it, and it never became a story that it should've been.