isdn

Ruu_Old

my bro just moved house and got in a normal phone line. When he asked the engineer about what high speed was on offer he mentioned of isdn, but said about how far the local exchange should be, we're round 2-3km from it. He said not to bother with it, it wouldnt be worth it and wouldnt work too well. I thot it you had to be within 6km, am i not able to recieve it. As much as i dont like Eircom policy, shouldnt their workers take a different look hehe

seamus

Well from what I've been able to obtain it seems that max distances for ISDN seem to be the same as for PSTN, meaning that anyone with a working phone line can get ISDN. I'm not totally sure on this though. I'm surprised at the honesty of the engineer though - he was right - ISDN is not worth it, unless your life depends on downloading stuff in the eves. The ISP's are clogged during the day, rendering your extra possible speed non-existant (we had a max 2.5KB/s one day until after 7pm) and the costs are crippling. I will always relate one of our bills (which turned out to be the last ) - where we had made £20 worth of calls, data and voice, and after adding line rental and VAT, the bill came to £140. That's £120 whether we use the thing or not. Plenty of people's PSTN bills are half that.

Manic

We have ISDN and we are approx 6 miles from the nearest exchange. It works ok but the download speed can be bad even on a 128k connection. If you are that far from the exchange and have a 56k modem I can understand what you are going through. ISDN will be a lot better (by better I mean you will get as good a connection as people close to the exchange will get) But if you open it to the full 128k connection it will cost you twice as much tie up your second line and the download speeds will not increase that much. If you listen to the Eircom AD for High-Speed it says that you can download huge files in seconds. This is a total lie unless they consider a 500kb file to be huge. If you can wait for ADSL or Cable or even Wireless to become available then wait. But don't fall into the Eircom High-Speed trap if you can help it.

emmet

I'd rather stick forks in my eyes than pay the huge premium for this antediluvian technology.

Stonemason

Ive just had ISDN unistalled it took them 6 months to do it as for downloads i used to average about 7kbps up to a whopping 14kbps using both lines (at twice the price) woop-de-frigging-do.Only thing i would say is for online gaming it was good but the cost far outwieghed the benefits and another thing you might like to think on is if eircon can get away with peddling its out of date ISDN option at rediculus prices why would they want to bring in ADSL ?.


Stone


Just a point of fact ISDN has been arround since 1979 if this is what eircom beleive is the high tech future of irish telecomunications it just shows how far their heads are up their own arses.

oscarBravo

Originally posted by seamus
Well from what I've been able to obtain it seems that max distances for ISDN seem to be the same as for PSTN, meaning that anyone with a working phone line can get ISDN.

You can take it from me as gospel (according to Paul ) that this is not true. There are distance limitations to ISDN -- stands to reason, it needs a constant 144kbps signal -- and you have to have a full pair. Which, around here, is about as likely as having a full pair of hen's teeth.