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<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>>Why didn't BRI catch-on in the US?
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I a word--greed. It arrived shortly after
divestiture when there was a lot of competition in the market and a dozen
independent regional telcos. Apparently they saw a huge cash cow for this
data service and yet another competitive advantage to proprietary implementation
details. I used to live in GTE territory (now Verizon) and they were
charging 2 cents per minute of connect time! This was on top of monthly
fees that were unreasonable to begin with. I don't know if they have all
caught on now and fixed it, but its too late now because most of the US has DSL
which is 10x the data rate and supports VoIP for voice.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I'm fortunate here that Qwest has offered it for at
least 10 years at rates comparable to two POTS lines and no per minute
charges. When I started using it, in my situation I got more features for
less money than two POTS lines, which I would have needed instead.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The irony is that the direct cost (equipment) of
ISDN is less per B channel than POTS. Anyone who has ever compared the
cost of digital versus analog station cards for a PABX, knows painfully the cost
of supporting A/D conversion, 90 V 20 Hz ringing and even DTMF registers.
If they had wanted to the telcos could have made ISDN cheaper than POTS, still
made money and moved technology forward in the process.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>But to illustrate the mentality, GTE, who I
mentioned above was serving the affluent community I was in with stepper
switches in the CO until well into the 1980s! They put tone to pulse
converters in front of them (initially for an extra fee) so they could support
DTMF. Ironically they only put 600 ms interdigit time in the converters
and the steppers could take up to 800 ms to find a link for the next digit, so
the call failure rate ran 10 - 50%! I ran a PABX at the time and we did
our own tone to pulse conversion just to avoid that. With 800 ms
interdigit time we had at least 99% completion!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Wilton</FONT></DIV>
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