Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: Torsten Dahlkvist Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: The Torsten & Jim ISDN Chat Show (was ISDN & TCP/IP) Message-ID: <2353@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 21 Dec 89 08:59:30 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Reply-To: Torsten Dahlkvist Organization: Ellemtel Utvecklings AB, Stockholm, Sweden Lines: 110 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 9, Issue 587, message 7 of 9 In article <2267@accuvax.nwu.edu> munnari!cit5.cit.oz.au!jwb@uunet.uu.net (Jim Breen) writes: >I feel somewhat humbled talking about ISDN with someone like Torsten, >who is clearly well on top of both the technology and the pit-falls. My irony-detector started trembling on that paragraph. I'm not used to such praise. Must be my old inferiority-complex acting up again :-) >It is also fascinating for me, an Australian, to be discussing topics >with a Swede via a newsgroup moderated in the US. What is also >fascinating is the apparent low level of understanding of ISDN in the >US. Uh oh, asbestos suit on quick... >Why is this? Is it the state of fragmentation in the US telecommunications >industry? Does a country need monopoly suppliers like Televerket or >Telecom Australia in order to have a working ISDN? I can't wait to see the flames this is coing to cause! >Getting back to Torsten's reply to my reply to Dr Weber's questions, >clearly he is right; there *ARE* TAs around. The trouble is you can >scour the trade press and not find a single advertisement for them. >You can ask Ericsson's Australian subsidiary for details of Torsten's >TAs and be told that they can only supply bog-standard adaptors for >their MD110 PABXs (and this from the company which supplies the AXE >exchanges (COs) on which our ISDN is built!) Let me put it this way: I work at the company which did virtually ALL the R&D on both the AXE COs and the MD110 PABXs. *I* don't have even an MD digital line, much less an ISDN one. >As a Volvo owner (a Japanese speaking one at that) I am saddened that >Ericssons aren't taking on the world with their TAs. You can only take >corporate conservatism so far. Of course Jim is right. There's something saddening about the way big companies are going about this business, Ericsson not excluded. (Don't let anyone at Management see this...) You see, while small compared to the dragons of the telecom world, Ericsson is still in many aspects an uncomfortably big corporation when it comes to introducing changes. The MD110 PABX is manufactured by one company division while the AXE exchanges are made by another one. Unfortunately, phones and TAs are considered "office equipment" and thus fall under the same division as the PABXes. The sales people over there are utterly convinced that "ISDN can never be a success because they use 4-wire installations which must obviously be twice as expensive as ordinary ones". Needless to say, the Ericsson-specific (digital) feature-phones and TAs available for MD110 use 2-wire installations... ("bog-standard" to use Jim's words.) But all is not lost yet. I forwarded the message that "there are no TAs for sale in the US" to some appropriate people who immediately started sprouting little $$-symbols in their eyes in the best possible Scrooge MacDuck-style. We've made a HUGE investment in R&D on these buggers and every sale would be a help in cutting the losses! The problem preventing an immediate introduction is that the entire U.S. ISDN spec is "bog-standard", i.e. U.S.A. has chosen to specify a different method of rate adaption than the rest of the world and there are other "sublte" differences too. Some of them are fairly easily overcome - like the protocol differences I mentioned in my previous posting - while others would need major re-designs (or at least program changes in several micro- processors). I wasn't aware of that last part until I asked around a bit. Sorry. But I must ask a question to the net, U.S. readers in particular: I know for a fact (= I was there when it happened!) that Ericsson has been approached by one of *the* major Japanese electronics manufacturers (no, I'm NOT going to say which one - I'm far out on a limb as it is already!) which wanted to sell a line of ISDN phones with built-in TA functions. Essentially a small feature-phone with a V.24, X.21 or (I think, but memory is vague) X.25 connector. We tried it and found that with minor changes in CO software it could be used with our CO (remember I said our implementation is *very* close to the international standard. We like to think it's *the* closest one on the market at present!). Now, the price tags on these phones were rather persuasive - I think they'd be a success on the U.S. market at once if they were released. My question: Does any net.reader know if they're available in the U.S.? If not: Does anybody know why? My own hypothesis so far is that they're slowed down by those very same "oddities" of the U.S. ISDN spec as have deterred us. Knowing the capacity of these Japs I'd expect US-type TAs shortly unless your own import restrictions prevent them :-) /Torsten P.S. Jim: has Telecom Australia made any introduction of BRI yet? As far as I know, Ericsson has only sold PRI to them; hence the MD110 stuff. P.P.S. MD110 = Ericsson's modular PABX. I'm not sure if Marketing has used the same name in the U.S, but it's currently beeing installed at MIT, so I know it's available there. It uses a proprietary (sp?) 2B+D 2-wire interface for feature-phones which provides "ISDN-like" facilities but (unfortunately) so far in a non-standard way. Torsten Dahlkvist ELLEMTEL Telecommunication Laboratories P.O. Box 1505, S-125 25 ALVSJO, SWEDEN Tel: +46 8 727 3788