Highway to Hell
What is it?
Home Highway (hereafter HH) is a package that has been around for ages from BT. It is their consumer level ISDN product, as opposed to ISDN 2e which is aimed at business. In essence HH is a box which gives you two normal (PSTN) phone lines and one digital (ISDN) line. Therefore you get 3 phone numbers, one of which is normally your existing PTSN home phone number. There are no variations which only have one PSTN number, which would have seemed logical to me to make it cheaper. As BT have a near-monopoly, I suppose they can get away with this.
Fitting it
For most people, getting HH will be a conversion from an existing line. You have to be a BT customer to join up, so in my case I had to come back to BT on a normal phone line before even ordering it. You have to fill in a load of paperwork and send it off to BT, and a few days later you get a letter which tells you when they propose to fit it. In my case I requested a Friday as I don't work then, and they got it right. About a week later the chap came to fit it.
The HH 'box' is a roughly 10x15x4 cm gizmo that is attached to the wall, running off an extension from your existing phone socket and which also needs to be near power for an AC/DC adapter.. Their guidebook recommends you put it near your PC so that the cable from the PC to HH box is short. BT won't drill any holes in your walls required for cabling, and will normally only run cables round walls to get it to the PC. In my case, I went mad with a powerdrill to allow a cable connection between the main phone socket and the IT room:
The initial fitting takes about 40 minutes, then the engineer has to go back to the local exchange to enable it. In my case, when he got back, only the PSTN lines were working, and the ISDN was showing an error on his cable tester. After about an hour of waiting in a queue to a BT office in Edinburgh, the engineer got through to a software bod who ran some diagnostics on my line. To cut a long story short, there was another trip to the local BT office to pick up another HH box, which this time worked.
PC Hardware
The ISDN card I got for my machine is an Asuscom ISDNlink 128k (P-IN100-ST-D). This is an internal PCI card, which is recommended for online gaming over an external serial one. There is a version of this card also which allows you to connect a phone line to the ISDN line (add a V to the product code above), but as you already get two phone lines with HH, that seemed overkill.
It puts a taskbar icon on your PC which has some utils, the first of which I used was the Line test. This works by dialling back into your own machine somehow. That all passed OK. Setting the ISDN card up is very simple. Its pretty much a standard plug and play, with the only difference being you pick one of the 2 ISDN channels to communicate through rather than a modem (more on this below). Everything else pretty much sets up like a modem.
ISPs
You can really notice the difference in the ping times from different ISPs with an ISDN, to a far greater degree than with a 56k modem. I started off by trying to continue with my existing BT Internet account using Surftime. While this could be fine late at night and other times when bandwidth demand for other users was low, the performance drops right off in early evenings when everyone is checking their email. Bt doing a ping in command.com to www.barrysworld.com I tended to get results like 55,69, timeout. At other times it hovered round the 69 mark. Given this amount of packet loss, I tended to even get disconnects from game servers. Not good. At the other end of the scale I tried connecting to Barrysworld dial-up directly, which is a pay-per-minute dialup. This gave me pings in the mid-30s, and rock solid in-game pings to nearly all UK servers - in the 30s and 40s. Nice, but I can't afford it. I ended up settling for Demon Internet, connecting using Surftime. While not on a par with Barrysworld, their pings average a fairly consistent 55 to barrysworld.com and about 70 to 81 in most game servers, with few disconnects or spikes. I settled on this as satisfactory for most non-competition gaming.
For general browsing, the difference between ISPs is not quite so pronounced, but I can still notice pages loading faster off Demon, possibly more so than even with Barrysworld who are game-focused. ISDN is still far from perfect - the internet is subject to a lot of ebbs and flows in bandwidth which are influenced by a lot more than your connection to an ISP. Things such as the speed with which servers resolve IPs are important for example. While downloading speeds in Gozilla go up from roughly 4.5k/sec on a 56k modem to about 7.2k/sec on single channel ISDN, I would think this scarcely justifies the cost for most people.
Costs
The conversion of an existing phoneline from BT costs £50 as long as you sign up to a package at £40/month for the 3 lines, out of which you get a £13 call allowance. Assuming you use those £13 of calls each month, the line rental is therefore £27 a month. In my case I signed up for the ISDN line through Solwise, who give a £40 cashback deal on the ISDN connection as long as you buy your ISDN hardware from them (The Asus card costs £30).
On top of this you need to allow in your ISP costs. As I say above. I feel that to make using ISDN worthwhile, you need to have a good ISP to get fast and reliable pings. Firstly most people are going to want Surftime evenings and weekends, which costs you £5.99 a month for unmetered access during that time. Problem is, only a few ISPs support it so far- the big guys being Freeserve, Demon, BT Internet, and (soon, I'm told) Nildram, the guys behind Jolt. Also Surftime only allows single channel (64k) ISDN access, so to get the full 128k which your ISDN line can support (i.e. dual channel) you have to pay 2 phoneline connections. In short I see it as you have a choice of going for :
A: a Surftime package and connecting to a cheap but not-so-good ISP for surfing, and pay per minute with the likes of Jolt or Barrysworld for gaming (or gaming at unusual hours when bandwidth is freed up).
B: paying a highish monthly fee to a better ISP to play games on Surftime too.
C: Just paying per minute to get real belting performance, but don't blame me when your phonebill arrives.
Conclusion
With the supposedly imminent arrival of ADSL, going for ISDN seems like a bit of an odd proposition. The reality is however that despite the hype, there are several big problems with ADSL. .Firstly, the rollout is painfully slow - and given that I live in a smallish town the chances of getting it inside a year are slim. Secondly it is expensive, with the cheapest solutions being around £50 a month, slightly more even than ISDN. Thirdly, reports on ADSL as it is being (badly) implemented in the UK seem to be that it is a bit 'lumpy'. The shared bandwidth mean that when the kids in al the other houses on your shared line are DLing porn mpegs, you're not likely to get a decent service. A mate is a small office in London has gone back to his 56 k modem as its faster most of the time than his ADSL line. Others say its great - there is just no guarantee is the problem.
To be honest, I wouldn't really recommend HH to a home user unless they are into gaming where pings and improved upload bandwidth are essential. I'd also recommend it to people who need to free up their phone line for calls rather than having it tied up on a modem - it isn't much more expensive than a second PSTN phone line. It isn't blindingly faster than a 56k modem for general surfing, and you can't get the full 128k bandwidth unless you pay for two phone connections, making it pretty useless for decent streaming video (audio os OK) or big downloads. On the other hand, for gaming it is, for current games at least, an ideal solution. My pings are around a third of what they were on a modem, and spikes are much reduced. There may be a problem with games in the future which rely on real-time voice comms, or when ADSL and/or cable become the norm and game developers get sloppier on their net code. Hopefully by that time however the UK exchange monopoly will be over and there will be a range of other options to suit. In the meantime, if you can afford it, HH is the way to go.
