New Capabilities; New Applications

These scenes and hundreds like them are happening today throughout the Northeast and throughout the nation. And all share a single phenomenon: a telephone technology known worldwide as Integrated Services Digital Network - or ISDN.

Why is this technology so important? Because it offers inexpensive dialed, fully digital access to the worldwide telecommunications network. Which means it is no longer necessary to lease costly dedicated lines for high-speed digital transmission, or to limit data speeds and accuracy to the plodding modems of analog technology.

These major increases in the speed of data and document transfer, in turn, make possible and practical a whole new breed of applications - from telecommuting and inexpensive video conferencing, to teleradiology and remote health care; from distance learning and worldwide collaborative engineering, to remote broadcasting, LAN-to-LAN internetworking, interactive publishing and more.

It is also a technology that represents the next generation of the world's telephone service for all forms of communications, including voice.

NYNEX ISDN

Today, ISDN is available in a rapidly growing number of areas throughout the NYNEX region. With an estimated 300,000-500,000 lines now in service nationwide, and an annual growth rate of 40 percent a year projected well into the next century, ISDN today is one of the most rapidly growing telecommunications technologies in the world.

"There is enormous pent-up demand for increased bandwidth at an affordable price" said Dr. Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com, and formerly CEO and publisher of InfoWorld. "The slow speeds of modems simply can't answer the needs of today's digital desktop."

Len De Paolo of Communications Planning & Services Inc., a systems consultant and integrator serving the New York metropolitan area, agrees. "Raw ISDN speeds are almost ten times as fast as the typical 14.4Kpbs modem sold today - and as much as fifty to seventy times as fast with today's still-emerging compression techniques.

"A typical 10-megabit file," he adds, "a large page-layout, spreadsheet or database file for example, can be transferred across the street or across the nation not in the 12 minutes or more a modem would take, but in less than half a minute.

"That's pretty good speed through a telephone line."