[adamretter]

Back around 1996 I was working for a non-profit rural digital project in Devon, Southwest England, called Project COSMIC. If I recall correctly there were 2 main types of ISDN in the UK at that time (a) on-demand, which was similar to dial-up, and needed an ISDN modem, or (b) leased line ISDN which was always on 24x7 and terminated in a Router. I was lucky enough at COSMIC to have access to a 64 Kbit/s ISDN leased line. As I recall it was insanely expensive, I think it was about £16,000 / year in 1996, and that doesn't include the initial install cost where they had to drag a cable across the fields and install poles.

On the end of COSMIC's leased line, after the Bay Area Networks router, we had a simple Ethernet Hub, a Windows NT 4.0 Server, and several Windows 95 desktops. We used IIS to serve websites and email for customers from the NT server, and all the machines had public IP addresses without a firewall - the Internet was a different place back then!

A few years later ~1999 they upgraded to a 128 Kbit/s ISDN leased line, I think costs had decreased and the additional capacity did not cause a large jump in price. It was brilliant! Many games of Quake were hosted ;-)

Later in around 2004 I worked for a company that had a leased line, but they used an entirely different technology - LES10 (10 Mbit/s) - but it had a range limitation and so you had to be within perhaps 10 KM of your ISP.

Of course, just before that, around 2000/2001 some parts of the UK started to get ADSL trial role-outs. I was lucky enough to be at University in one of the first areas (Derby), and we were able to get a 1 Mbit/s connection for about £50 / month which we shared between 5 of us in our student house. After that I didn't see ISDN around much, and LES10 was a pretty niche use-case anyway.

Today I am happily sat on the end of a 100 Mbit/s consumer microwave connection for about €30 / month.

[teh_klev]

> 64 Kbit/s ISDN leased line

That would have been Kilostream which wasn't part of the ISDN system. Kilostream pre-dated ISDN. The reason for its high cost was that you could throw as much data as you wanted to 24hrs a day and it was a point to point dedicated circuit, i.e. you couldn't "dial up" different locations the way you could with ISDN.

[adamretter]

@teh_klev That's interesting. I thought I also remembered the DSU being branded with BT ISDN logo, but perhaps I am mistaken, it was a long time ago now!