GIIF held its second business meeting of the year in London on 11-12 November 1999. BT hosted the meeting at their Holburn premises. 33 delegates from all 5 continents attended the meeting. Among the delegates were representatives from two of our newest members Telekom Malaysia and KPN Telecom.

David Greggains of the ADSL Technical Forum, he presented on DSL in the Future Access Technologies session. Michael Reuter of Deutsche Telekom AG gave an interesting presentation on ISDN Marketing Strategies within DT in the ISDN Highlights session.

Current GIIF projects were reviewed and updates were given on the work to date.

Many other issues were addressed and discussed at length. For a full update see the final report from this meeting which is available on the website.
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Further information on the summit will be available shortly and will be forwarded to you in due course.

GIIF Business Meetings - It is the intention of the GIIF to hold two business meetings per year. The business meetings should be seen as the driving force behind the organisation. Because the number of delegates is always much less than at a summit, these meetings tend to be more intense and productive. It is at these meetings that decisions on the future of GIIF are taken, proposals for new projects are received, and much work is carried out on the current GIIF projects. It is crucial as a member of GIIF that you have some form of representation at these meetings so that you can be involved in the decision-making.

No definite dates or venues have been confirmed for the GIIF business meetings to be held in the year 2000 however possible venues include Norway hosted by Telenor AS and Italy hosted by Aethra S.R.L. Communications.

As soon as details on the business meetings are confirmed you will be informed immediately.

The current GIIF website is under review. A proposal has been drawn up with the suggested changes. All areas of the site need enhancing, although functional and easily navigated the current site is much too text based and frankly offers no appeal to the user.

The GIIF now has 40 member organisations representing the major players within the industry. Since the last edition of the newsletter KPN Telecom, Nokia and Tellabs, Inc. have become members.

Some people are rather rude about the ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) digital telephony system. To them, ISDN stands for an "Innovation Subscribers Don't Need," or "Internet Saves Dying Network." And the brickbats are increasing with the arrival of broadband services such as ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) and cable modems.

Critics argue that high-speed services such as these make ISDN redundant, and many would probably agree with the verdict of Nick Rosen, research director of the London-based Online Research Agency. He says: "ISDN is an inferior and outdated technology."

But others within the telecoms industry are more in tune with Adrian Kennard, director of UK communications specialist company Andrews and Arnold, who says: "Reports of ISDN's death are exaggerated."

Klaus Allion, divisional director of Bosch Telecom UK, says: "The roll-out of ISDN has been slow and so customers did not buy into it as expected. Three factors affect customer take-up: availability, marketing - and that includes pricing and promotion - and applications. ISDN now has all three."

There are two versions of ISDN. Basic Rate ISDN (BRI) offers two 64 kilobit (64,000 bits per second)

channels (known as B-Channels), which can be used to carry voice, data or a combination of both. The two B-Channels can also be combined to offer a 128 kilobits per second data connection.

Basic Rate ISDN is primarily aimed at small-to-medium enterprises, the small office, home office sector, teleworkers and residential users, although corporate usage is not unknown. Primary Rate (PRI) ISDN offers up to 30 B-Channels in Europe (23 in North America), and is aimed at larger companies and corporates.

The Global ISDN Industry Forum (GIIF) - which has more than 40 members involved in the ISDN market including British Telecommunications (BT), Deutsche Telekom, MCI Worldcom, Ericsson, Telenor and AT&T - says that the largest ISDN markets are in Germany, France, the US, UK and Japan, although Norway has the highest penetration rate, with 41 per cent of subscribers using ISDN.

The US National ISDN Council estimates that by December 1 1998, there were 1.5m BRI lines in service in the US, with a growth rate approaching 400,000 lines a year. During the same period, more than 100,000 PRI lines were in service with a growth rate close to 60,000 lines a year.

A report from the Asia ISDN Council (AIC) says that there were 5.5m ISDN channels used in Japan during the same period.

The research company Frost & Sullivan forecasts that the 1999 European ISDN market will have 32.4m B-Channels yielding revenues of $27.8bn. In 2004, these figures will rise to 81.8m and $42.9bn respectively.

Operators offering ISDN services report a healthy uptake. David Drysdale, ISDN manager for Cable and Wireless Communications (CWC) says: "We started selling Basic Rate ISDN around nine months ago and it's taken off like a rocket."

France Telecom reports that ISDN represents 50 per cent of the lines taken by its medium to large enterprise customers.

But the arrival of ADSL (which can offer much higher data speeds than ADSL is being marketed at residential ISDN) has led to some questions about the long-term future of ISDN. Mr. Kennard says: "ADSL isn't rocket science - high-speed data connections have been around for years. The difference is that users. ADSL will be offered by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) as a high-speed link to the home or office, but ISDN is more than just a fast connection to the internet."

says Marc de Villepin, France Telecom's marketing director of corporate voice services.

Steve Bigrave, BT's in-life manager for ISDN and BT Highway, adds: "ISDN gives you a lot of network services like call forwarding, call deflection and call diversion. With ISDN, you can pick up a phone and call anyone with an ISDN or POTS (analogue) connection. You can't do that yet with ADSL."

Susan Sirmai-Feinberg, senior director of Global Transmission Service for Teleglobe Communications Corporation, says that ISDN is available to 90 per cent of US telecoms subscribers, but coverage of the new technologies is more patchy: "Some companies have ISDN links to 50 or more sites. Are they going to give up that investment for something that can't be used across the country?"

Incumbent telecoms companies will want to make the most of their investment in ISDN, says Ian Upton, consultant at the European IT Service Group CMG: "ADSL is being introduced to counter the threat of cable modems and not because telecoms companies want to give it to their customers. ISDN is already being re-packaged as a high-speed internet connection for residential users."

As the telecoms world moves from switch-based to packet-based technologies, investment will move towards the latter, says Gabriel Dusil, marketing director of Motorola ING (Europe, Middle East, Africa), but he adds: "I think we'll see ISDN having a life-span of another five years or so."

Research company Datamonitor says that ADSL services will result in a fall in ISDN prices, making the latter attractive to more cost- conscious companies. Datamonitor believes ADSL and ISDN will co-exist, and forecasts that in 2000 ISDN will account for 37 per cent of European business internet access accounts and DSL technology will account for 1 per cent. In 2004, the figures will be 31 per cent for ISDN and 21 per cent for DSL.

ISDN is addressing the threat of ADSL in other ways, too. A third ISDN channel, known as the D-Channel, is normally used to transmit small amounts of data (up to 16 kilobits per second) for call switching. There are now plans to use the D-channel as an "always on" data connection. BT has launched ISDN Connect, which allows the D-Channel to be used for telemetry applications such as credit-card verification and petrol pump monitoring.

With developments like these, it is little wonder that some believe that ISDN now stands for: "It's Still

Doing Nicely."

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The next edition of this newsletter will be produced at the beginning of March 2000. If you wish to contribute to the next newsletter please send all items to members@giif.com. The board of directors will approve items.

BT launched its ISDN ‘Applications Showcase’ in December.

In co-operation with a number of ISDN equipment Manufacturers a range of demonstrations have been developed.

These have been designed to address key business themes with ongoing development driven by customer and industry feedback.

The themes are:

The aim is to show how ISDN can be used in Business and at home whilst practically demonstrating the potential of future ISDN applications.

Customers will be able to visit the Showcase‘virtually’ using large screen video projection.

In addition to this, development facilities at their research centre are being made available for ISDN equipment Manufacturers to address individual customer application scenarios using advanced and current service versions of ISDN.

Information about the demonstrations in the showcase will be available shortly from the BT ISDN web site.

Current standards and practice for ISDN s-bus premises wiring are based on wiring configurations which require the connection of all terminals to a single bus (figure 1).

Figure 1 An example of linear s bus wiring (showing 4 pieces of terminal equipment and terminating resistor).

This limits the flexibility of the wiring and makes the connection of additional terminals difficult if they are not located close to the installed wiring. A more flexible solution is possible if terminals are connected in a ‘star’ configuration, in which each terminal is connected to a central ‘hub’ by its own individual cable (figure 2).

Figure 2 Star wired s bus (showing 4 pieces of terminal equipment and terminating resistor).

However, there are constraints on any s-bus configuration because signal propagation times are critical. In addition, the star-wired configuration places the bus terminating resistors at the hub, instead of the extremity of the bus, which also degrades the transmission performance as the length of the extensions increases. The limits for the currently standardised configurations were established many years ago following extensive testing, but these do not include the star wired configuration. In response to the demand for a more flexible s bus layout, BT has carried out further extensive laboratory tests to establish the necessary design parameters for a star wired s bus.

Tests were made with terminal adapters (TAs) connected to one or more ports of the hub (to a maximum of 8) over a range of different lengths

of ‘Cat 5’ cable. The distance between the NTE and the hub was also varied, though over a lesser range. For each test, a bit error rate measurement set was connected to one of the TAs and a call was set up to a second TA on another basic rate ISDN line. Here the bit stream was looped back, returning over the same connection to the input port of the BER measurement set. A simplified drawing of the test configuration is shown in figure 3.