PBX ISDN ?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. Does anyone know why the various PBX vendors insist on continuing to sell their own proprietary multi-line digital telephones instead of standardizing on ISDN? I realize that the vendors need to support their installed base, but it seems as if it would make more sense to head in the direction of supporting standards at the desktop. If the various PBX manufacturers would agree to migrate to ISDN, then AT&T could sell telephone sets to Rolm and Northern Tel customers, etc. There may be some temporary loss of market share by losing the captive audience, but the bigger risk is that they will lose *all* of their market share to upstart competition.

A. "Upstarts" are not likely in the PC biz. It would take over $100M up front to crack the PBX market, just developing software, and profit margins are near zero (often negative) anyway today. "Upstarts" go after niche markets, little ACDs, call processing systems, etc., but the main desktop PBX market is left to the big guys who can support it. Now let's all recall the great fortunes lost in the early 1980s on failed venture capital or corporate-diversification PBX startups. Second reason: ISDN was misdesigned for the desktop. The S/T interface needs two pairs, while modern PBX-proprietary digital phones run on one. And the U interface is overkill for interior wiring. I suppose I could start a new thread about needing new BRIs for both, a long-loop (26kf) U and a 2-wire busless S/T, but that's off this thread. 1. Today, proprietary sets are able to provide more functionality than NI-1 Standard ISDN sets. For example, National ISDN 1 standards did not specify call transfer as a feature. Most PBX users would like this feature. 2. PBX manufacturer's use their station equipment as a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Some PBX manufacturers have responded. Northern Telecom's Meridian PBX does support NI-1 ISDN station sets. However, customers have CHOSEN not to buy many because the existing proprietary sets are so much more functional at this point in time. Did your phones do what you needed them to do for the last five years? If so, you've gotten your money's worth. Besides you probably don't have NI-1 standards based ISDN. If its been in for five years, you probably have a proprietary AT&T or NT ISDN solution so you have a much more feature rich environment already. What you actually have is PBX service with proprietary sets just as I described. Except in your case, the PBX is the CO switch and the phones are proprietary ISDN sets. The point I was making was not that ISDN is bad, its just that standards based feature sets represent decision making by committee which by its nature will lag the market in the adoption of new 1. They are more expensive to manufacture, and 2. They have a limited feature set, so a PBX manufacturer can not implement features, that customers want, just because it is not defined in one of the ISDN standards, which is the next difficulty: there is more than 1 standard, in the US the are 3; AT&T, Northern Telecom and National ISDN. I know, that in Europe some vendors have started to offer ISDN phones behind PBXes, but for the mentioned reasons, their success is rather limited.

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