Organization: W S Rupprecht Computer Consulting, Fremont CA
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Date: 28 Jun 2003 07:55:20 -0700
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> In the U.S., ISDN has seemed to largely be the technology that never was.
> (Technically, it's out there.  I think that my ISP offers it...  But if
> memory serves, prices are comparable to DSL, with lower performance,
> and many people also have cablemodem options.  Fewer and fewer people
> are out of reach of *both* DSL and cablemodem, while ISDN isn't a big
> enough hop up from modems for many.)

Sadly ISDN was out and flopped in the US long before cable modems or
later ADSL.  One thing that killed it was that the phone companies
absolutely refused to put it out with pricing similar to residential
service using plain old (analog) phones.  Very few people were going
to put up with per-minute charges on ISDN if they could get free
analog calls.

I'm just starting to look around at making a digital answering
machine.  I've got a multi-gig disk sitting here waiting to store my
phone messages and to do a bit of pre-screening of telemarketing calls
coming from "Out Of Area".  (Why can't answering machines have a mode
where they pick up such calls right away with a nasty message???)
Being able to hear them from any web connected host that plays mp3's
or oggs would be a great bennefit.  The problem is that to get the
phone's bits into the computer either needs a clunky analog phone card
(with some super-human DSP effort to get rid of the echo) or an ISDN
line which will cost me quite a bit more than the analog line.

So just out of interest, will the European ISDN cards work in the US?
What are the best PCI cards to use over here?

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht 		     http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/