Siemens I-SURF manual Drivers and Applications, Overview, Ndis WAN Miniport

4. Drivers and Applications

4. Drivers and Applications

4.1 Overview

You can use your ISDN Adapter for a wide variety of applications. The most important applications are:

Online services - Internet access via PPP (direct dial-up to an Internet provider), AOL, CompuServe, and others.

Direct data interchange between two PCs.

Telecommunications services - e.g. fax (analog/G3 or digital/G4), voicemail, Euro File Transfer.

BBS access using terminal emulator programs.

Since, historically, these applications evolved independently of each other, different types of driver concepts are required for ISDN integration. NDIS WAN Miniport, CAPI, and VCOMM are the most important of these drivers and are of course supported by your ISDN Adapter. Each driver offers at least two basic functions:

Opening and closing a connection (D channel)

Transferring payload data (B channel).

4.2 NDIS WAN Miniport

The NDIS WAN Miniport driver was specified by Microsoft and is a part of Windows 95/98 and Windows NT. The connection is controlled by the RAS (Remote Access Service, Dial-Up Network). Special drivers, namely Microsoft’s NDIS WAN Miniport and ISDN Accelerator Pack constitute the connection to the ISDN Adapter. When the RAS has established the connection, the ISDN Adapter is seen by Windows as a network interface card similar to those used for local area networks (LANs). This means that all programs that can exchange data over a LAN can use this pathway for communicating via ISDN.

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