mgrant@MIMSY.UMD.EDU (Michael Grant) (04/27/88)
Dick Jackson, (whom I could not reply to directly...but that's for another list!), was wondering what ISDN buys someone. Well basically, it dosn't buy you anything if you are going to use it just for phone calls. If you use the 64K channels to push data down, like if you dial up from home, then ISDN becomes useful. The catch is that currently there are no devices that use ISDN yet. I think Hayes is selling, (or at least will be selling) a codec that would replace the modems on regular phone lines on ISDN lines. I've seen almost full motion, full color video phones that are supposed to work over ISDN. Of course every vendor uses their own compression standard and any two who want to talk have to have the same type of video codec at each end. You could build fax machine for ISDN. Power companies could use it to read your meters, (though I doubt this will happen much because the companies will want to pass off the costs to the customers, and the customers won't buy it). But in real life, it's definatly a bussiness/electronic enthusiast toy. I can't really see any reason for everyone to run out and get it. The biggest win of it would being able to run video over it, but it's not great video, and the video codec's are likely to be *very* expensive. -Mike