The future of ISDN


This page under construction.

National ISDN

Most of the interesting R&D being done is in the B-ISDN world, and in the world of applications.

Surprisingly though, there is still a lot of standardization going on with Narrowband ISDN, which amounts to standardizing the standards. This is pretty dry stuff, voltage levels, ring volumes, and various things needed for vendor interoperability. The set of interoperability standards referred to is called National ISDN.

Applications

The standardizing of applications is really separate from the ISDN standards themselves, but these applications will be important to the future success of ISDN. Currently research is being done into ??? vidphones, low-res voice, high-res sound,

Broadband ISDN

There is still a great deal of work being done here. The biggest area of work is in the finalization of ATM.

The real world

As ISDN is deployed, few people are currently replacing their home phone system with an ISDN phone network. The trend for now seems to be providing an entire ISDN netork in a single box, with the NT1, TA, and TE1 equipment all built in. An example would be the Pipeline 25, from Ascend, which provides ISDN to ethernet connections, using IP. It has an NT1 built in, and provides two phone jacks for standard POTS telephones.
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