ISDN – Integrated Services Digital Network – was a telecom technology that predated DSL, which itself grew out of efforts to extend the reach of ISDN.
ISDN is a rich set of protocols and standards which are central to VoIP, wireline, and wireless phone services, and enable Wideband networking.
In the 90’s when ISDN rolled out across America, an effort was launched to stifle ISDN technology because of what it enabled.
The Last Mile
ISDN was a digital networking technology putting modulated data on top of plain old telephone service (POTS). The standard wireline had a lot of signal issues, limiting ISDN services to something around 1800 ft from the telephone switch. DSL is the outgrowth of technology to extend that length and increase speeds.
But in 1994 as the US switched from analog to digital services, a threat to surveillance was discovered that set up the required demise of ISDN to be replaced with the “Internet”.
Why was ISDN a threat?
To create a data call, each “voice” switch became a massive packet forwarding implementation of MESH networking. Surveillance of analog telephone activity used a device called a pen register to collect called number meta data. ISDN digital phone switch capabilities went far beyond the meta data, preventing reasonable surveillance of messaging content of millions of concurrent calls and messages. Despite a last mile speed of 128kbits per line, the total bandwidth through a switch exceeded Internet router capabilities at the time. The KEY take away is that ISDN was a mesh technology, and that was a problem for wholesale surveillance.
Despite ISDN standards supporting above T1 speeds (1.5mbps) and faster over DSL enabled distances, the disinformation campaign against ISDN branded the mesh packet routing as obsolete and too limiting at 128kbps, while completely ignoring the huge advantage of INTEGRATED SERVICES. The disinformation campaign hoisted DARPA’s view of a centralized backbone network where all packets were passed through routers that could split data pipes to monitor and copy data for recording.
Today, nearly 30 years after DARPA’s Internet take over, 50 or more “Integrated Services” applications developed for ISDN have yet to be deployed. Society is completely surveilled, and cellular service geo-location provides IP address meta data tagging for all activities.
Web 3
Besides the continued improvements in technology, industries recognize the difficulty of application fault-tolerance – the possibility of single point failures whether intentional or incidental outages. Whether ESG or disinformation censorship, open technology is now implemented as DECENTRALIZED architectures where free speech, free markets, and free thought can escape the cattle chute of the slaughter house imposed 30 years ago.
Combined with assertion of new legal structures defined by state law, the decentralization of finance, contracts, and legal identification, enabled by immutable block chain, exploits the real potential of the former ISDN but now should be defined as the Integrated Services DECENTRALIZED Network.
BEWARE!
The demise of the former ISDN was caused by deflecting its potential of Intelligent Network Applications focusing on its lowest speed technology (128kbits). Today Web3 (the latter ISDN) is characterized by distributed ledgers (aka blockchain) as the disruptive concept for success rather than simply what it is: a method for public immutable databases. The TRUE concept for success which is enabled by blockchain is the keyword: DECENTRALIZED.
Government acts like a gas expanding into every niche and filling every vacuum. It has already infested itself into digital currency, enabling fiat institutions to integrate crypto custody while blocking chartered SPDIs equal access to master accounts; Government, colluding with BigTech is prepared to issue digital IDs, while ignoring DIDs and SSIDs, not to mention the entire goal of social control by ESG scores.
In all of this, we do not own the network used to distribute our data, a potential and catastrophic single point failure. Barring probable compromises Starlink has made to achieve SpaceX approvals, we need to think about private networks which create a breach in surveilled chain of custody. Integrated Service applications no longer depend on the single point failure of central distribution and backbone routing application platforms.
