With British Telecommunications Plc proudly showing off its Integrated Services Digital Network links to other countries, a new user group has highlighted the lack of interworking between two of the UK telecommunications monopolists’s own services. The UK ISDN Forum came into being last week, promising to help users influence future developments of Integrated Services Digital Network in the UK. The Forum, which is being run by Ray Walker out of the British Standards Institute’s Disc Office is a self-financing, non-profit-making organisation that is open to both users and suppliers. Among the issues raised at the first meeting was British Telecom’s inability to support supplementary services when a call is passed between its ISDN/2 basic rate service and its ISDN/30 primary rate access. Supplementary services provide customers with information such as incoming call number identification and give them control over their calls more commonly associated with a PABX. The trouble is, according to Walker, that while ISDN/2 conforms to current standards, the primary rate access offering still contains elements of the old pre-ISDN standard multi-line IDA service. Basically all you can do is make the connection said Walker, adding that British Telecom had said it would take from two to three years before there was any improvement. British Telecom was unavailable for comment. The Forum is also looking at developing a standard way for computers to move data across the digital network; Walker says the new telecommunications medium is in danger of being beset by the same problems as the public switched telephone network with its mixture of conflicting file transfer protocols such as Xmodem, Zmodem and Kermit.
