There is a perception in the UK that British Telecommunications Plc is not overly keen on selling ISDN to its residential customers. Quite true, says Anthony Corris, the company’s marketing manager in business communications. The problem is that the company has only limited ISDN capacity at the moment because of the way that it is implemented at telephone exchanges. So the company is using a marketing strategy aimed at corporate customers combined with relatively high connection charges as a protection against unbridled demand, which sounds perhaps, a little optimistic. The network capacity problem arises beacuse currently the company’s System X and AXE 10 digital exchanges do not support ISDN directly – instead, customers are served through special multiplexors hanging off the side. Within the next 18 months to two years, this will change as the first wave of line cards are installed that support ISDN directly, with the result that residential customers should get a more enthusiastic response when they enquire about the technology. The big challenge that BT faces in the future though, is to turn ISDN into a mass-market technology by installing it in every home by default. This, Corris calls the ‘North Sea Gas Option’ after the massive conversion exercise in the 1970s when UK Gas Board had to replace or convert every domestic gas cooker to get it to work with the new fuel.
Gas Board
Unlike the 1970s Gas Board, Telecom has its hands tied by the regulator: the Office of Telecommunications would take a dim view of it cross-subsidising ISDN installation at the expense of another part of its business. Beyond that there is the sheer cost involved in visiting all of its customers and replacing the BT box on their wall with another, more expensive one and writing off the old analogue exchange line cards. Forcing its customers to junk their telephones and buy expensive new digital handsets will not be popular either, so BT is considering installing combined analogie and ISDN junction boxes – which has the disadvantage of pushing up the cost yet again. One of the cost-cutting measures that that the company is examining is to share the installation costs with the other utilities. The gas and electricity companies suffer from the scourge of meter-reading and despite 3m unemployed still don’t seem to be able to find anybody to go round knocking on doors at times when anybody that works might actually be at home, and the water companies are moving to metering. But the problem could could disappear if every household were equipped with ISDN, since the 16Kbps packet-switched D-channel would be ideal for interrogating the meters remotely. Corris says that there are talks with at least one of these companies, but is too early to say whether any will bite.
