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I had ISDN back in 1996 and it was great. It felt dramatically faster than a 56k modem because ISDN has much lower latency. Web pages were so simple in those days they loaded almost instantly.

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I remember the jump from 28k and 56k to a 128k ISDN when playing Myth TFL, Quake 2 and Half-Life in the late 90s. It was marvelous!

And then came the switch from ISDN to DSL and the latency got worse again.

I remember that back in the xDSL days we had never-ending discussions about interleaving vs fast-path. If you could enable fast-path, you could reduce your latency in half, but not all ISP supported it and your connection would be more sensitive to noise and errors, so it was not always worth it.

Upstream mattered a lot for responsiveness. This was really before the idea of ACK Prioritization [1] TCP connections, so the standard small upstream of 56K had an impact that didn't quite get felt as much as it did on symmetric ISDN.

Most things silently incorporate ACK prioritization now, which makes the typical asymmetric internet connection like a cable modem work better. But before then, it was a problem... And those of us who hand-solved it on DIY firewalls really reaped the rewards.

[1] http://www.benzedrine.ch/ackpri.html

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