ISPreview investigates the future of ISDN in the UK

Even if you have a ping of 60ms on ADSL or C-Modems, depending on where you live that ping might jump up to 180ms for an instant. While it's nothing big, in multiplayer land that causes jerks and pauses, potentially meaning the difference between life and death. With ISDN it's only the server stability and speed you have to worry about it, not those sharing the same connection down the road.

-Plenty of add-ons:

ISDN is a well-established connection medium and as such there are plenty of connection options and advanced network hardware on offer.

-Cheap ISDN Hardware:

In the last few years since Home Highway ISDN hardware has become extremely cheap, you can pickup an internal card for as low as £20 if you shop around. Despite pricing the differences are often small.

-Established UK wide ISP support:

90-95% of UK ISPs and even global ones provide support for ISDN connections and most modem server terminals now come with ISDN options built in.

-Competitive prices from varying operators:

Another advantage is that most Cable Operators specifically offer ISDN installation but for half the price BT ask. Some will even do it for as low as £15 or £20 a month line rental as well as half price installations.

-Multiple backbone providers:

Unlike broadband, ISDN doesn't need to go through the BTNet backbone; it can operate off any backbone that offers an ISP connection into it.

-Line Rental included:

Broadband devices such as ADSL don't actually include the line rental, which means a £40 per month ADSL connection actually costs nearer £70! With ISDN you can pay as low as £27 (BT) and that includes line rental, so excluding unmetered calls it's actually more than twice as cheap. Even if you added an extra £20 per month unmetered ISP you'd still be paying less, this is a mistake most people make.

ISDN Disadvantages:-

-Max of 128Kbps up/downstream:

Obviously 128Kbps is a good fast surfers speed and to be honest if you're going to get broadband then you really have to have a good reason. Broadband is only good for multimedia such as live video, large downloads, business connections and working from home etc.

However the fact remains that 128Kbps is still a physical limit and no matter what happens, with the exception of compression, you're not going to get any higher!

[Print Page | Next Page (3)]>>