[comp.dcom.telecom] Standards activities, ISDN plug

goldstein@delni.DEC.COM (Fred R. Goldstein dtn226-7388) (04/21/87)

That little plug GTE sent in the mail last week about more services over
the same jack was a simple plug for ISDN.  The idea of ISDN is to have
a standard jack that you can request, per call, your choice of bearer
service -- voice, audio, data, packet.  It's a couple years away from
commercial deployment, but field trials (not quite the real thing) are
under way.

Re: Standards.  They used to come from New Jersey.  Nowadays, they
are nominally made under the purview of ANSI and its accredited T1
committee, run by the Exchange Carriers Standards Association (in NJ,
of course).  About a hundred companies (at least) belong.  T1 work is
done by its Technical Subcommittees, currently:
	T1C1 - CPE connections
	T1D1 - ISDN
	T1M1 - Maintenance
	T1Q1 - Quality of Service
	T1X1 - Inter-carrier connections
	T1Y1 - Specialized subjects

FWIW, T1C1 has generated, and T1 has sent for ballot, a standard defining
loop start and ground start analog lines.  Finally, an official "standard".
     fred (T1D1 rep at ume I