Demystifying ISDN (Demystifying Series)

£9.03

For US audiences only - not relevant to UK - Who am I? IT Consultant just setting up in business with a home office. Computer, communications and networking literate.What did I want from this book? An insight into what the ISDN service could provide, and an idea of what additional equipment was available and what I might need, and how much and what type of equipment I could attach to the ISDN line.What did I get? I started reading this with high hopes, but was soon disappointed. This book is targetted at the US market and is virtually all concerned with the different types of ISDN service and termination you get from different US operators. There is a large section on how to fill in US order forms. Chapters 1-3 (up to page 50) have the occasional sentence that is generic instead of US-centric, but after that, forget it!Let me be clear - I am not knocking the book as a guide to ISDN in the US, it looks as though ordering ISDN in the US is a minefield and this book could be very worthwhile.It is just that the book is not relevant to the UK and Europe, and the title is a little misleading. It should be called Demistifying Odering ISDN in the US .There was little information about ISDN routers and terminal adapters, and features to look for in these devices.One final point - I think I detected a certain amount of bias towards ISDN and was not convinced by the arguments that ISDN would be better than e.g. a cable modem. I felt that the author was trying to find ways to justify using ISDN instead of taking a dispassionate view.I picked up some useful points, e.g. that ISDN can support compression protocols. A UK-centric book would have told me that most UK ISP s don t support this :-(Summary: For US audiences only - not relevant to UK.Title a little misleading - 10% of the book tells you about (mainly US) ISDN and 90% tells you about how to order and configure in the US.I learned far more from the BT ISDN help line (highly recommended) and the web pages of ISDN equipment suppliers.