On Fri, 27 Jun 2003, Thomas Hafner wrote:

> Richard Rauch <rkr@olib.org> writes:
>
> > Maybe everyone uses ISDN where you are.  I've never seen it first-hand.
>
> Not everyone, even not the majority. But it's not uncommon at all in
> ``old Europe''[2]. See the answers from Martin Schmitz (TLD .de) and
> Mirko Thiesen (from Berlin, see signature) - thanks to both for their
> answers!

I think some clarification about ISDN being "obscure", "not uncommon" or
whatever might be helpful in order to understand what Thomas is saying.

For several years - starting in 1993 as far as I remember - Germany's (by
then) one and only telephone company Deutsche Bundespost TELEKOM "forced"
people politefully to switch their POTS lines to ISDN. They did this by
subsidizing the purchase of ISDN equipment with phone bill credits up to
800 DM which is about US$ 450. Many nowadays common things were in Germany
only available with ISDN by that time: call waiting, three party
conference, ringback, caller ID, and so on. Thus, _many_ people happily
threw away their old modems and bought ISDN cards.

SuSE, a German company, knows all this, and that's why they have ISDN
support in their distros for quite some time now. Since most GNU Linux
users in Germany use SuSE, native ISDN support is some kind of "God-given"
to them. When I talked about NetBSD to GNU Linux users some years ago,
most of them would find the fact that they needed to do more than just
check the ISDN box during OS installation annyoing and complicated --
although - as said before - ISDN integration with I4B wasn't really
complicated at all. Many of them refused to try NetBSD just because of
this. (Maybe people not willing to enter a few lines into a text editor
should stick with software from Redmond, but that's another topic ...)

I understand that in many/most other places in the world ISDN might be
"obscure", and I also understand that especially in the US -- the home of
the flatrate -- ISDN isn't important at all. You didn't need this
technology ten years ago, and you don't need it now, because you just
"skipped" it.

But I really hope that "non-Germans" can now understand why we German guys
always moan about missing ISDN support in US products. ISDN is just
common, ordinary technology over here.

Bye, K&K,
T-Zee
-- 
thiesi@NetWork23.Sytes.NET ---- NetBSD: Power to the people!
Tel.: ++49-(0)171-416 05 09 -- Fax: ++49-(0)171-134 16 05 09
Mirko Thiesen, P.O. Box 26 03 54, D-13413 Berlin, W. Germany
             "We're with you all the way, mostly"