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Telephone Service That Rings of the Future
By Joshua Quittner. STAFF WRITER Newsday
(Copyright 1992 by Newsday,Inc. Reprinted and posted by permission)
TO JOHN PERRY BARLOW, a point man for the computer culture, it's
the next step in the "Great Work. The physical wiring of collective
human consciousness--the idea of connecting every mind to every other
mind in fullduplex broadband."
To Ohio Bell, it's a way for customers to have up to nine
telephone numbers--some for specific friends, some for the bill
collectors--for the price of one.
This technological Rorschach test is called Integrated Services
Digital Network. And not since the invention of television have so many
people looked at one thing and interpreted it in so many different ways.
Technically, ISDN refers to an architecture--the software,
hardware and protocols needed to deliver a mix of voice, video and data
over a digital telephone network. This is important because it is a way
of squeezing every bit of capacity out of the twisted pair of copper
wires that the local telephone company runs into your house, bringing
the kind of services that are usually associated with more expensive
fiber optic cables.
When Barbara Bush videoconferenced from the White House with
children at a Baltimore hospital at Christmas, she was using an ISDN
connection. When a group of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory scientists
work at home, ISDN enables them to use their personal computers, without
a modem, to tap into the lab network and get a data connection 27 times
faster than normal. The Rochester Telephone Co. and AT&T recently
completed an ISDN experiment in which phone company employees used ISDN
to telecommute from their homes.
With the lifting of restrictions that barred local telephone
companies from providing information services, the Baby Bells are
looking for ways of getting into the information business. Fiber optic
cable, the hair-thin strands of glass that convey signals at the speed
of light, is considered the ultimate way to transmit information
services, both for its speed and high capacity. But the cost of
deploying fiber has stalled it at curbside; telephone companies estimate
it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to extend it into homes.
By using the existing copper wires that connect homes to lo
cal telephone companies, ISDN could be a far cheaper, more quickly
available alternative, a "ramping up technology," to fiber, said Barlow.
With software developer Mitchell Kapor, who is famous for the business
spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, Barlow founded the Cambridge, Mass.-
based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public interest group dedicated
to defining and promoting the rights of computer users. The organization
is lobbying for ISDN as the medium for an easy-to-access, national
public network of computer users.
Will ISDN stay where it is, mostly with businesses, or will it make
the connection to people's homes? The answer depends on whom you ask.
"I think we're at a critical period in the deployment of ISDN
because up until now, it has not been possible to make an ISDN telephone
call from the service area of one phone company to another," said Marvin
Sirbu, a telecommunications expert and professor at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh. Sirbu said that ISDN gained momentum recently
with industrywide agreements that created standards for equipment makers
and service providers to interconnect nationally. That should occur by
the end of 1992. It means that the 300 or so isolated ISDN islands will
be able to talk to each other and the technology is almost certain to
proliferate, at least between businesses, he said.
BUT SIRBU discounted the EFF's notion of a public national network
based on ISDN and said it was wrong to expect the telephone companies to
deploy it for information services.
"I have followed the trials and tribulations of home information
services for more than 10 years," he said. "Everybody keeps saying when
the technology gets cheaper it will be a big success or when the
technology gets better it will be a big success. But I haven't seen any
applications that would make this a big success in the home. The issues
here are marketing issues and finding out what the right product is that
someone wants at home."
Commercial interest in ISDN seemed to peak in 1986, when
McDonald's Corp. was the first business to try it out. (Two executives,
two miles apart, spoke on the phone while looking at video images of
each other and while transmitting a graphic of the Golden Arches onto
their computer screens.) Though the technology spread to the rest of
corporate and high-tech America, it did so slowly; uses were pretty much
limited to a kind of advanced Caller ID option.
For instance, if you call your credit card company's 800 number
from home, chances are your name and records will pop up automatically--
before you even identify yourself--on the computer screen of the
customer service rep as he takes your call. With ISDN, a company can
also tell if you called, were put on hold and hung up without ever
speaking to a person; if they want to, they can call you back. It also
allows them to note in their database that you speak only Spanish and
automatically route you to a bilingual operator.
The anticipated--and current uses--for ISDN run from the poetic
to the prosaic.
On the poetic end of the spectrum is the Electronic Frontier, which
is pushing ISDN as the ideal platform for what has beendubbed the
National Public Network. Barlow said that that network would carry, in
addition to normal telephone calls, multimedia electronic mail, in which
users could send a mixture of voice and video; personal faxes, software,
games "and other media not yet imagined." The network, in his view,
would be the ultimate expression of "global free speech," giving all
users an unprecedented chance to interact.
"We believe that ISDN, whatever its limitations, is rapid enough to
jump start the greatest free market the world has ever known," said
Barlow.
ISDN can deliver data 27 times faster than a 2400-baud modem, the
telephone-computer interface that most PC users use. It does this
digitally, by creating two 64-kilobit-a-second channels that can be used
for voice or data, and one 16-kilobit-a-second channel, on your phone
line. With developing data-
compression techniques, users could get a combination of voice,
pictures, music and video. "Multimedia postcards," as Kapor put it.
"Today, it's the case that you can do very high-quality picture phones
over ISDN at very, very good quality," he said. "Compression techniques
are continuing to evolve so it's reasonable to expect that we will have
VHS-level quality" over copper wires.
But, while more than 60 percent of the country will be ISDNready
within two years, Kapor, Barlow and others worry that the telephone
companies will do little with it for residential users, aside from
offering their business customers--where most of the money is for phone
companies--some ISDN services.
"Telco mindset was developed in an era of highly centralized
networks in which it took a decade of court battles to give you the
right to attach a suction cup to your telephone," said Kapor. "Computer
industry mindset, especially PCs, was born in garages and attics where
teenagers, kids, and outsiders invented the Apple II and Lotus 1-2-3."
So Kapor and the EFF has been trying to line up the support of computer
and software manufacturers, among others, to lobby in Congress and among
the public utility commissions state by state, for a more directed and
speedy deployment of ISDN.
Currently, there are some 300 ISDN "islands," each centered around
discrete ISDN-equipped phone switches. No one knows exactly how many
there are, nor how many users they serve, though the vast majority are
dedicated telephone lines that run from telephone company switches to
specific businesses.
Though users within each island can interact using ISDN, they can
not interact between islands because the companies that manufacture ISDN
switches used different standards, and because there was no standard
interface between the ISDN that a local telephone company uses, and the
ISDN that a long-distance carrier uses.
However, standards by Bellcore, the research arm of the Baby Bells,
should bring all the switches into conformity by the fall of 1992.
Stan Kluz, an ISDN expert at Lawrence Livermore, recently hooked
the first group of ISDN users off site, into the laboratory's computer
network. Kluz said that through this arrangement, 12 scientists who live
near the University of California at Berkeley can use their computers at
home, and have access to data at 64 kilobits a second.
With speeds that fast, the scientists can manipulate huge amounts
of data and see their problems displayed in three dimensional graphics
on their home computers.
Kluz sees the future of telecommunications and it is ISDN. He says
that videoconferencing on all ISDN-equipped computers at Lawrence
Livermore will be available soon; with nationwide interconnection
agreements, he hopes to see "distance learning" in which a class in,
say, nuclear physics, could be videoconferenced at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology to the computer of a Lawrence Livermore
scientist, who can take part in the class.
But Kluz, who also serves as president of the California ISDN Users
Group, echoed Kapor and said that the phone companies aren't moving fast
enough to create demand for the service. "They're not marketing it
well," he said.
NYNEX spokesman Joe Gagen--as well as virtually everyone else
interviewed for this story--said residential ISDN is a classic chicken
and egg problem. In order for people to want it, there have to be
services. But information service providers won't proliferate until
there's a demand. Gagen said that residential demand will grow as people
become exposed to ISDN at work.
"It's not going to happen overnight," said Colin Beasley, staff
director of network planning at NYNEX. "My guess is that from an
affordability and deployment point of view, you're probably talking
about 1994-1995 before you'll see broad penetration into the [New York]
residence market."
****
Telephone Service That Rings of the Future ISDN has already
penetrated New Albany, Ohio, where 16 ISDNaccessible homes have been
built. The country-club-style development (median house price, $700,000)
surrounds a Jack Nicklausdesigned golf course and, its developers say,
is the first commercial application of residential ISDN.
Neil Toeppe of Ohio Bell Telephone Co. said homeowners have the
option of giving out up to nine telephone numbers from an existing
telephone line, each with a different function. For instance, the number
listed in a phone book could be programmed to run into an answering
machine; a second line can be given out to friends, and ring only on
telephones in designated rooms; a third number could be for the
children's phone and it could divert to voice mail after 7:30 p.m.
Within a year or so, residents will be able to have the local
utility company monitor their thermostats, using the 16 kilobit data
channel. That will let homeowners subscribe to a kind of power sharing
agreement under which the power company will virtually control the
thermostat in exchange for discounted rates. Other features will also be
available--as soon as someone figures out what they are.
****
--
josh quittner
voice: 1.800.544.5410 (2806 at tone)
quit@newsday.com