Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

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If you think POTS sounds good, you should try ISDN, it'll knock your socks off! Back in the mid-90s I got ISDN BRI (2x64Kbps channel) service in to replace analog modem service. It would connect in well under a second, and while connected at 128K we could receive a phone call (dropping one of the channels, so having voice plus 64K data), and the phone calls sounded quite good.

It used to be that for recording remote interviews or even I believe just general voice recording like audio books, the media companies would have you come into a location that had ISDN, and if you were a real big timer you might have ISDN in your home studio.

That was back in the day when they gave a crap, then the pandemic came along and the media companies seemed to be happy throwing any crappy video chat up for broadcast, not matter how echoy the room you're in or how many drop-outs.

WRT fiber optics, we are just now starting to see Q.com (Century Link) deploying fiber to the neighborhoods. Up in Canada in a similar sized city they deployed fiber back in 2000, but in the states QWest wouldn't do it because, I've been told, it would open up allowing CLECs to put DSL equipment in neighborhoods, and let them cherry-pick neighborhoods to offer service in. Finally a few years ago the city stepped in a ran fiber to every house, which honestly is a better option IMHO.

Or if you want something that you can actually get (since it's impossible to get a new ISDN line as a consumer), you could do VoIP with G.722/Opus or cellular with HD Voice (AMR-WB). The quality is honestly on par with ISDN.

And yes, ISDN is still the gold standard for remote voice acting work, but as ISDN lines have gotten more difficult to order a lot of folks have been moving to VoIP. I've heard an app called Source Connect is popular in the broadcast industry, and supposed to provide equivalent quality to ISDN.

ISDN... before it was too expensive, now you can't get it anymore.

VoIP with G.722 is wonderful when it works (you can't just call everybody with it, because both parties must support it). G.711 (A-law or µ-law depending on which continent you are) also works perfectly and gives the same quality of a regular landline. But in all cases the IP transport behind should work well, with very low jitter and not too much latency.

I've had Quantum Fiber in Seattle for a year or two now. It's fantastic! Symmetrical upload/download, no data cap, 1gbps, and I pay something like $75/mo.

I was paying $100/mo to Comcast for the same thing, though I had 1.2gbps down/35mbps up.

Is your endpoint routable? Is the IP fixed or dynamic?

Yes. Dynamic as the IP is renewed everytime your device resets

Good to know, I was passingly wondering what the service level was that they were offering. CenturyLink currently can only offer me 60Mbps/5Mbps for $55/mo, until Q.com builds out more of the town.

That compares poorly with the city FTTH which is 1G/1G for $70/mo, 2G/2G for $100, or 10G/10G for $200/mo. A static IPv4 is another $20/mo (which is admittedly pricy for an add-on, but $90/mo for gig with static feels fine to me).

The crowd I ran with in college were the types to order a home-based T-1 service, and it was absurd how unobtainable ISDN was.

We'd receive Sun workstations on our desk (I worked for an ISP) and we'd sort of chuckle at the built-in ISDN interface while we connected the 10BASE2.

We never sold ISDN links; our modems were state-of-the-art 14.4K or you could go Frame Relay, leased line, SMDS.

We did maintain one leased digital 14.4K line, due to some unique circumstance, and I still wish I could forget.

> and I still wish I could forget.

May I ask why?

Sure, being a unique situation it also presented unique support challenges, and I seem to recall that the link was the one that most often turned red on our network map, perhaps even teasing us as it flapped up/down for a while, and we sat with bated breath to see whether it really required our undivided attention.

Also I suppose that it was considered the least important of our "dedicated" customer links, being legacy/low-cost, so most of us would've welcomed an upgrade to something more "1990s".

Many providers have ways of passive-aggressively dealing with legacy customers until they upgrade or go to the competition. My DSL ISP sent me into the arms of the cable provider about 12 years ago.

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