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A few years back, after listening to the excited ravings of a bleedingedge technoid friend, I looked into getting an ISDN line for my netsurfing pleasure.
If I recall correctly, I needed three boxes - terminal adapter (T/A), NTI and power supply - that would have set me back about $I,zoo. Then I needed to deal with a back-room telco engineer to order the service, since the nice ladies in Customer Service knew nothing about ISDN.
The hairy-eared engineer, once he was done disgustedly explaining things to ignoramus me, would turn me back over to the Nice Ladies, who would ask me if I wanted to pay the $500 installation fee, $I25 per month basic rate and per-channel per-minute charge via Visa, Mastercard or gold bullion. Then I got to call my ISP, who wanted to know pretty much the same thing, only they didn't take Visa or Mastercard.
Finally, about $2,ooo up front and $250 per month later, I got to fight to get the finicky hardware, the hairy-eared engineer and the ISP to all work together.
To no one's surprise (except that of my technoid friend), I stayed with analog.
Recently, I reached a point where highperformance communications were no longer a netsurfing luxury, but a necessity for my ROHO. My gleanings from the technical update columns was that ISDN had gotten a lot easier, so I took a deep breath, rolled up my sleeves, dipped a toe into those dangerous waters...
...and found out it's not just easier, it's dead easy.
INSTALLING THE DIVA T/A
The key to the whole project was Eicon's (Dallas, TX - 972-4I7-5500) DIVA T/A, a hardcover-book-sized box that (like most modern "ISDN modems") combines the terminal adapter, NTI line interface and power supply in one small case. That case, although small, also manages to contain every cool ISDN feature and capability under the sun.
Installing the DIVA T/A was a matter of connecting its serial port to my NT workstation, connecting its plugpack power supply, and inserting the Eicon CD-ROM. The installation utility added the T/A to my system's modem list, installed the Eicon configuration manager in Control Panel, checked out the DIVA T/A to make sure it was connected and configured correctly, then took me through...