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From: herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com (Daniel Lance Herrick)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: Predictions on what ISDN can be used for?
Message-ID: <1190@limbo.Intuitive.Com>
Date: 14 Sep 90 02:59:51 GMT
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Approved: taylor@Limbo.Intuitive.Com

Rob McMurtry writes:

> The projected cost of ISDN in the U.S.  is around $120 billion
> (communications is a $640 billion/year business).  What do we want to
> see for this kind of investment?

*We* are not spending this money.  Our telephone system suppliers are
spending it for the purpose of making more money by providing you with
better, more flexible service.  The convenient features are available 
from the software in current central offices and are not related to ISDN.

With ISDN, you could build a national network of fiber optic channels and 
then sell people bandwidth.  But AT&T and MCI and US Sprint have already
done this.  You could lay a few under the Atlantic, and sell trans-
Atlantic communications without the annoying satellite transmission
delay, but someone is ahead of you there, too.

Your network address does not tell me what school or town you are in,
however, you should have access to a reasonable technical library.
Browse through the last two or three years of the journals published
by the IEEE Communications Society, expecially the one with a title
like "Selected Topics in Communications".  You will find some things
you can understand scattered among the things that are intended only
for insiders.

The telephone long distance network has been mostly digital for several
years, now.  The conversion is taking place along with the conversion
to "equal access" forced by the court decision that broke up the Bell
System.

That digital network has lots of bandwidth designed in to take care of
peak loads of telephone conversations.  That bandwidth could carry other
traffic when the voice traffic is lower than the design peak.  Hence,
various standards bodies are specifying the "Integrated Services Digital
Network" that will mix other traffic, such as digital communications 
between computers and video signals, with the voice messages on the
same network.

Daniel Lance Herrick