AGONY, ECSTASY, AND ISDN OUR EARNEST COLUMNIST ORDERS A HOT NEW PHONE LINE FOR DATA COMMUNICATIONS. INSTALLATION IS AN ORDEAL, BUT IT'S WORTH IT.
By MICHAEL J. HIMOWITZ REPORTER ASSOCIATE EDWARD N. BROWN

(FORTUNE Magazine) – So here I am, logged on to the Web Museum watching Renoir's The Luncheon of the Boating Party scroll gracefully down my screen. Then it's over to Atlantic Records, where at my kids' urging I download the latest audio clip from Hootie & the Blowfish. Next stop, the CDnow Internet record store, where I listen to a real-time broadcast of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9. Finally, I take an audiovisual tour of the colorful Doonesbury Town Hall.

World Wide Web sites like these separate real Internet junkies from people who have something better to do. That's because these sites are so loaded with graphics, sound, and other multimedia gimmicks that you'll grow old waiting for them to strut their stuff for you--even with a high-speed modem and a good phone connection. Normally, I wouldn't have the patience.

But tonight is different. Tonight will stretch until four in the morning while I log on to all the cool places I've never had the persistence to visit before. Tonight, after five weeks of hassles with the phone company, I finally have ISDN--warp drive for telecommunications.

ISDN stands for Integrated Services Digital Network, a hardware and software combination that allows your home computer to communicate with your Internet provider or office network up to five times as fast as it can now. ISDN performs this magic act by extending the phone system's digital signaling right to your home over regular copper wires. Those wires were designed to carry voice communications, but ISDN makes them equally adept at handling data. In fact, you can make a voice call and a computer call on the same ISDN line at the same time.

So why doesn't everybody have this great technology? First, ISDN isn't cheap. Second, getting an ISDN line installed is about as much fun as having a wisdom tooth extracted.

I spent $680 getting set up: that includes $173 for the line, $315 for a piece of hardware called a BitSurfr, and $175 for a Bell Atlantic technician who wired my house and set up the software on my PC to work with ISDN. You can do this yourself--but trust me, it's a lot easier to rent an expert.

On top of the setup charge, you'll pay a monthly fee, which varies widely by state. According to James Love of the Washington, D.C.-based Consumer Project on Technology, Tennessee homeowners get the best deal: $27.50 per month for unlimited use. Californians get a flat rate of $25 for unlimited nighttime ISDN, but Pacific Telesis wants to hike that fee substantially. Other states' monthly rates run from $48 to $75.

Here in Baltimore, Bell Atlantic charges me $34 per month plus 1 cent to 4 cents per minute, depending on the time of day and how heavily I use the service. If I spend an average of an hour a night on the Net, my monthly bill will total $51. By way of comparison, regular flat-rate phone service costs me about $25 per month.

Setting up ISDN is a lot more complicated than ordering regular phone service. Until recently the Baby Bells sold ISDN mainly to businesses that were willing to pay a hefty surcharge and had in-house technical help to get it running. But now the World Wide Web is a smash hit, and at the same time many large companies are pushing telecommuting to cut costs. As a result, consumers want ISDN, because connecting to networks with the prevalent technology is a drag.

The fastest modems designed for voice lines transmit data at only 28.8 kilobits per second--and only if the connection is perfect. That's fine if you want to download this column: Without the illustration, these 9,000 characters of text can be yours in less than four seconds. But if you want one of the Web's graphic wonders, like Time Warner's Pathfinder home page, hang on. That particular page typically takes up to a minute and a half with my 28.8 kbps modem.

With ISDN, Pathfinder's home page arrives in 30 seconds or less. A single ISDN channel--or "bearer," as it's known in the trade--moves data at 64 kilobits per second. Each ISDN line comes with two of these so-called B channels. You can combine them into one 128 kbps pipeline, but that takes some technical voodoo. Most people use one channel for data and the other for a regular telephone, since each channel comes with its own phone number.

The phone companies, as I soon learned, don't really understand how to sell ISDN to consumers. Market researchers say the number of ISDN lines in the U.S. increased by 50% last year, to a total of 450,000. Compare that with the 120 million regular phone lines that the Baby Bells have serviced for years.

Still, I thought I had it good. My local provider, Bell Atlantic, owns 33% of those 450,000 lines. The company says it's adding 4,000 to 6,000 ISDN customers a month. I had no trouble finding a friendly customer representative who was willing to make me one of them. Indeed, she told me Bell Atlantic would be happy to sell me a complete package--the line, hardware for my computer, and a visit from a technician who would wire my house and set up my software. The whole thing was supposed to take six to 12 business days.

I should have smelled trouble when she told me how this would all play out. First, she said, one technician (let's call him Mr. Outside) would hook up a clean line from the central office to the telephone network interface--the wiring box outside my house. But according to the way Bell Atlantic is regulated, that technician can't work on wiring inside a house. That's why, when he was done, she told me, they'd send another technical expert to run the wiring from the box to my basement and to set up the software on my PC. (Yes, we'll call this guy Mr. Inside.)

Getting together with Mr. Inside proved difficult. The first appointment I had was cancelled because Mr. Outside hadn't delivered a clean line. The problem was something called a bridge tap, they said. The next time they cancelled an appointment they'd discovered that they needed to install something called a repeater to amplify the signal because my house is more than 3.4 miles from the central office. Then they said the repeater fell off the pole.

So it went for five weeks. I'm an easy-going guy, and I know enough about communications to realize there's more than a little hocus-pocus in it. There were also a couple of holidays and a snowstorm to slow things down. But I finally started to lose it.

Twice I even had to stay home from work waiting for Mr. Inside. The first time, nobody showed. I called and learned that Mr. Outside had told Mr. Inside about the bridge-tap problem, but nobody had told me. The second time, Mr. Inside showed up, but Mr. Outside hadn't bothered to tell him that the line still wasn't working. Mr. Inside did his job anyway and left, saying that everything would work okay once Mr. Outside did his thing.

I went ballistic. I called up Ms. Sales and threatened to rip everything out and send it back. Magically, a newcomer--call him Savvy Mr. Outside--appeared that very afternoon, full of apologies. He got the line functioning in three hours. That night I booted up my computer and logged on to the Web with ISDN.

Compared with some other battered ISDN warriors, I had it easy. When the Bell Atlantic folks finished, everything worked as advertised. In some areas of the country you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone with expertise in residential ISDN, let alone to help with setting up your computer to use it. In many locations the phone company will merely deliver ISDN to the wiring interface outside your home. You're left to do the rest by yourself or by hiring an outside contractor.

MY ADVICE: get all the help you can afford. Installing ISDN is a technical nightmare. You have to change some wiring inside your house and install two new devices--a special kind of phone jack and something called a network termination unit (an NT-1 for short). Then you have to buy a terminal adapter for your PC. These gadgets, which cost $300 to $600, look like modems and take a modem's place on an ISDN line. Some terminal adapters, like my Motorola Bitsurfr, have the NT-1 built in. Finally, you have to program the terminal adapter to work with the kind of switch your phone company uses and get your software set up to work with all of the above.

The ISDN guru at ClarkNet--my regular Internet service provider--told me that the uninitiated can easily spend seven or eight hours fiddling around with the terminal adapter alone. Sometimes connecting takes days or weeks. Find a Mr. Inside, and pay the money gratefully.

Regardless of who does the work, you'll also have to make sure your corporate network and your Internet access provider are equipped to handle ISDN. Not everyone can. Since ClarkNet was just testing its ISDN service, I set up an account with PSINet (703-904-4100), a national Internet service provider with ISDN access in most major cities. The company's InterRamp service costs $29 for 29 hours per month for a single ISDN channel and $1.50 per hour after that. If you use both ISDN channels, InterRamp charges an additional $1.50 per hour. While this is a bit pricier than most local Internet providers, setting up with InterRamp is a breeze--at least by ISDN standards.

As time goes by, I'll figure out how to connect with ClarkNet. I may even try combining my B channels into one high-speed connection. For now, I'm relieved to have ISDN service at all. I'm going to relax a while and enjoy life in the fast lane.

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Edward N. Brown

You can reach Mike Himowitz via E-mail at mikeh@clark.net