What is ISDN?
Telecommuters, for example, benefit immensely from ISDN. Whether you access the corporate LAN in the evenings or maintain a full-time, remote home office, ISDN is the next best thing to being there. E-mail, database access, and file transfers improve dramatically, making it seem like you're locally attached to the LAN.
Internet access is another great application for ISDN. Compared with even the fastest modem access, ISDN makes Web graphics appear almost immediately, and can reduce download times by over 75%. ISDN can even provide advantages over shared, higher-bandwidth office connections; PC Magazine advises that an ISDN connection can deliver better performance than a T1 shared among users on a LAN. And in many markets, it's actually cheaper than an isolated analog business line.
Such large-scale file transfer applications as medical imaging, insurance and law enforcement imaging, and the preparation of printed materials are additional arenas where ISDN proves highly beneficial. With the dramatic reduction in file transfer time, ISDN makes even multi-megabyte files available to recipients within minutes, not hours.
Videoconferencing is an emerging ISDN application that's growing fast in popularity and ISDN is currently the only practical way of making it happen.
DIVA T/A ISDN Modem Reference Guide ◆ Page 5