Targeting a peaceful coexistence
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Danny's dad is a nuclear pathologist. He deals with the sort of medical problems about which you never, ever want to hear. Basically, if Danny's dad calls, you're in major trouble.
Good old dad does his job by looking at high-resolution screens all day, finding cancer and other medical hot spots. Trouble is, to do this he had to be right at the hospital because the wonders of remote telemedicine had not yet worked their way into his radiology department.
But now, remote access to computers to send high-resolution images across distances - to allow for midnight consultations, for instance - is enabled via ISDN links from the homes of doctors on call. Trouble is, it's rather pricey, and the doctors are enslaved to whichever location the ISDN links happen to be connected.
So dad calls and asks why he can't use a cheaper cable modem from the cable company to get access to these files. "Well, you should be able to," smart son says. So Danny talks with the hospital MIS person (who took a year to get the ISDN working), who says that:
This does not mean it will work with a cable modem, but it should not take a physician to get the ball rolling. The trick is getting people in the MIS and IT groups to think ahead of this curve.
All sorts of applications that rely on ISDN for access can work perfectly well over IP links.
As you are able to get high-bandwidth IP access streams, you should start planning for how you are going to continue to support new and existing applications. If ISDN is costly, do you need to use it? Many of the ISDN-dependent applications now support IP streams. In many cases, they can support concurrent links to both ISDN and IP-access streams.
Now we're not telling people to rip out their ISDN links and go full-scale IP. In fact, you should keep the ISDN links - just use them for Internet or virtual private network access (IP over ISDN) rather than a single application. We are saying that you should look at those applications that have required ISDN in the past and make sure that's the way you want to support them in the future. Most ISDN applications used ISDN initially because that was all the bandwidth they could get.
And if you're using ISDN to support a remote application right now, consider using IP connectivity via whatever access method best suits your needs.
Using the more ubiquitous IP protocol would provide easy Internet access, while the ISDN link could be used for a wider variety of applications. Remote access gear costs could go down as well. On the down side, there is the potential for reduced performance and security could become a larger issue.
