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Users harvest a variety of applications - integrated sevices digital network - Harvesting ISDN

Telephony - October 26, 1992

Although many people remain convinced that the disadvantages of ISDN outnumber its advantages, there is a growing army of folks who think the technology provides their businesses with a competitive edge. While years of bad press haunted ISDN, many companies were finding ways to use it to save money and increase productivity.

It's been a long evolution. The digital technology that boasted such promise has had a tough time finding its place in an analog world. A lack of clear standards and the competitive backlash of divestiture worked behind the scenes against ISDN, making it--at least on the surface--appear to be the problem itself. Only a few brave businesses saw its potential clearly enough to gamble on it long before industry players began to address the issues of ubiquitous connectivity and interoperability, arguably the heart and soul of the technology and the key to its true capabilities.

But the cloud that has been raining on ISDN for so long is about to be pushed aside for good. TRIP '92 will showcase the technology at work today and examine its future applications.

The event also will celebrate the industry's ability to put its differences aside long enough to establish a battleground, according to Jim Jacobson, TRIP '92 co-chair and supervisor of institutional telecommunications and office automation for Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This accomplishment alone should be enough to convince any doubters that industry players are serious about making ISDN a viable technology useful and available to everyone.

TRIP '92 will kick off with the connection of a national ISDN, but the remainder of the week will focus on applications, which are the future of the technology. In addition to open houses demonstrating 21 applications at work in 115 locations worldwide, TRIP '92 will feature two days of presentation theaters sponsored by vendors and the Bell regional holding companies at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Va.

In the theaters, experts will discuss and demonstrate telecommuting, education, medicine, government/military and business/imaging applications. Another theater will explore the financial side of developing new applications.

Industry observers have long contended that the success of the technology depends on the discovery of a "killer application." As it turns out, several exciting applications have been developed, but no one has yet to claim the "killer" distinction.

Instead, the technology's flexibility, enabling users to create unique applications, has slowly come to be recognized as ISDN's killer quality. In the age of the sound bite, that comprehensiveness unfortunately has been a hard sell. The need to save money and increase productivity without having to rewire the world is probably a major reason ISDN is still hanging on and attracting an audience.

"ISDN's major benefit is really its ability to provide incremental improvements in a lousy network environment," says Tom Miller, vice president and director of home office research for LINK Resources Corp. "Users are ready to take the next step. They want to move forward."

LINK Resources recently completed a three-year study examining ISDN use in the home office, which Miller will discuss during Northern Telecom's presentation theater on telecommuting.

Telecommuting is more accurately characterized by the words "extended office," says Miller. Most telecommuters rely on their extended office tools such as laptop computers, modems and facsimile machines two or three times a week, he says, and it is a trend that has become widespread, he adds. In fact, LINK Resources reports, the number of home office households was 38 million in 1991, more than 3 million of which were involved in formal telecommuting.

ISDN gives home workers an advantage because of its speed and simplicity, says Miller. Without ISDN, workers have been accessing their companies' local area networks using regular or high-speed modems with data compression--less elegant solutions than ISDN, he adds.

"ISDN adapter boards for personal computers are becoming more attractive than modems because they sidestep the need for leased lines, bridges and routers," Miller says. "The price isn't bad, but it's not great either, and ISDN is not yet ubiquitously available."

However, he says, in regions like those served by Bell Atlantic, Ameritech and Pacific Bell where ISDN is becoming widely available, an adapter board would be a smart purchase.

Users instantly recognize the value of ISDN for telecommuting applications, and implementing it in the workplace would save most companies money and time, says Miller. However, bottom-up demand, budget pressures and the politics of merging corporate voice and data departments are making it difficult for users and telecom managers in large companies to convince their bosses to join the telecommuting revolution. Therefore, telcos should concentrate on marketing their ISDN telecommuting applications to small businesses, office campuses and government institutions, and remote work support users because they are the most eager and willing to change, he notes.

LINK Resources found that the ISDN applications most commonly used by extended office workers are workstation/telephone integration, high-speed file transfer, remote LAN access, multiscreen sharing and voice-annotated document transfer. Videoconferencing is further down the list, but there are pockets of excitement about this application, adds Miller.

Eastman Kodak, Rochester, N.Y., is especially enthusiastic about ISDN's videoconferencing capability. The company uses it regularly to hold conferences with its international offices and customers, according to Jim Briggs, the company's telecom manager.

"ISDN is perfect for videoconferencing because it gives you the cost of access for half the cost of two switched 56 lines. It reduces the wiring, local exchange charges and the number of boxes required in the video cabinet," Briggs says.

ISDN videoconferences also can be established easily with customers who are using switched 56 instead of ISDN, he adds.

"You don't even have to ask the other end if they are using a terminal adapter," Briggs notes. Price is also a factor--ISDN videoconferences cost just 25% of traditional videoconferences made on leased lines, he says.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., uses 300 basic rate interface ISDN lines and is beta testing IBM's Person-to-Person and Northern Telecom's VISIT desktop videoconferencing systems. Engineering design teams that work in various locations are using the systems for face-to-face meetings and file transfer, says Jacobson.

ISDN lines are also used for remote access to LANs and to link those LANs. The lab expects to someday install ISDN on all of its 13,500 lines. Once National ISDN-1 has been deployed nationwide, NASA centers will be able to take advantage of the technology's functionality, he adds.

"ISDN's greatest advantage is that it provides a high-speed 64-kb/s link that can be used for various applications," he notes. "ISDN provides extended office functionality without the cost of extending Ethernet to each individual user, and it does so at a substantially reduced cost."

The City of Los Angeles recently completed an 18-month telecommuting trial that was not supported by any high-tech equipment. The trial proved the value of telecommuting, so the city installed a few ISDN lines in its telecommunications department, according to Carl Holt, assistant general manager for the department.

"As telecommuting comes on more and more, we need to provide workers with access to our host database. We see ISDN as an economic alternative that provides us with both voice and data capabilities," says Holt.

The city's decision to use ISDN today will allow telecom engineers to get a jump-start on the technology as deployment increases. It also opens the door to digital technology, Holt says.

"We see signaling system 7 as the surviving portion of ISDN, which we expect to be relatively short-lived. But ISDN is a stepping stone to the digital network. Users need a stepping stone, too. The primary reason we installed ISDN is to prepare ourselves for the future," he adds.

One of society's biggest concerns for the future is education, and ISDN is playing a major role in this area. AT&T will host the education theater at TRIP '92 as well as the business/imaging theater. The education theater will include a presentation by Jim Strom, vice chancellor for university development at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C.

The university launched a distance learning project earlier this year in conjunction with AT&T, BellSouth and Compression Labs Inc. Appalachian State is linked via basic rate ISDN lines to two grade schools and one high school, all of which are using NCR personal computers and AT&T and Compression Labs video gear for interactive voice, video and data applications.

"This is truly a corporate partnership, not a demonstration and not a trial. We are paying our own way," emphasizes Strom.

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