• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Verizon discontinuing ISDN service

DoctorWu

DoctorWu

The lists have been flaming this morning with the news that Verizon has decided they will no longer accept new ISDN orders starting May 18, 2013.

I guess this was inevitable; the only question was when the first domino would fall and who would push it over. AT&T installation has been making noise about their reluctance to supply ISDN for over a decade now, but they would still install it if their buttons were pushed in the right sequence. Now, it seems, push has finally come to shove on a higher corporate level.

Some people have already moved to IP for remote broadcasts and found it to be excellent. Others have put off investigating that option, and this news from Verizon is definitely causing their frontal lobes to throb. We all likely knew that the paradigm would shift "someday"; it turns out that Verizon is the one to press the gas pedal to the floor.

You know that the carriers were just waiting for somebody to put their toe in this water. Verizon is likely just the first - more will follow. So what are we going to do?

-- Doc
 
Sgeirk

That would work fine for a short remote at a car dealer but a five hour NFL broadcast would be difficult to e-mail back to the studio. I have found wired IP connections at NFL stadiums to be inconsistent. Some places it works great. Some places it does not exist. Last season in Chicago we had to pay to use wireless Internet just to connect to NFL Stats.

I spoke with Mike Simpson today. He is the fellow that discovered a note in his ISDN Bill saying that BRI ISDN will no longer be offered in NY and Maryland after May 18th. Important to note that Giants Stadium (home of the next Super Bowl) in NJ is also in Verizon territory. Simpson told me there were 150 BRI lines installed in the Superdome for this past Super Bowl. Some folks are going to be in for a rude awaking when they try to install a line on radio row next year if this is allowed to happen.

I do believe ISDN is going the way of the world. I'm not sure the Public Internet is the solution yet for long form remotes.

hh
 
The public Internet will never be able to handle this.

Fractional T1/T3 is going to be the solution. All the telco's want ISDN to go away, but they still embrace T1/T3/OC3.
 
Oh, no! What's next? No dial phones? No party lines? No phone books? No dial for Operator? No DSL?

ISDN never got much respect from the phone companies. They used to joke ISDN stood for "Innovations Subscribers Don't Need."
 
bradgoehl...

Mike Simpson of Sports Backhaul Network was the one that received the notices in his Verizon bills. He e-mailed PDFs of the notices out to his clients. Not sure how to post them here.

hh
 
Broadcasts over IP work and sound great.*

* Depends upon provider, backbone health, shared / unshared, client-provided / custom installed, location wiring / router / switch quality & health, phase of the moon, alignment of Venus in regard to Mars & Earth, etc.

On the best of paths, you approach ISDN-like quality with a bit more latency/delay. In most cases, you'll need to bump up jitter buffers and error correction to compensate for variances. The buffering adds delay, making call-in shows a pain.

Generally with ISDN, if you can connect initially and it's good for a few minutes, you're golden for the duration of a broadcast. With IP, the "weather" can change on you fast.

I've also done quite a lot on Verizon LTE (4G). It's capable of really good performance, but it's scary how unreliable and variable it is. They don't over-build their networks, so cell sites saturate fast. You may be doing great at 3PM, but by 5:30 with commuter traffic, you may be off the air all together.

Bottom line is IP isn't as plug-and-play as many would have you believe. If you need to make sure a show happens, you have to have your own separate service of appropriate capacity installed, and use your own router. And order about 2x more bandwidth than you think you need to accommodate provider "marketing inflation", loading, and sub-par nodes.
 
VoiceOfReason said:
Broadcasts over IP work and sound great.*

* Depends upon provider, backbone health, shared / unshared, client-provided / custom installed, location wiring / router / switch quality & health, phase of the moon, alignment of Venus in regard to Mars & Earth, etc.

On the best of paths, you approach ISDN-like quality with a bit more latency/delay. In most cases, you'll need to bump up jitter buffers and error correction to compensate for variances. The buffering adds delay, making call-in shows a pain.

Generally with ISDN, if you can connect initially and it's good for a few minutes, you're golden for the duration of a broadcast. With IP, the "weather" can change on you fast.

I've also done quite a lot on Verizon LTE (4G). It's capable of really good performance, but it's scary how unreliable and variable it is. They don't over-build their networks, so cell sites saturate fast. You may be doing great at 3PM, but by 5:30 with commuter traffic, you may be off the air all together.

Bottom line is IP isn't as plug-and-play as many would have you believe. If you need to make sure a show happens, you have to have your own separate service of appropriate capacity installed, and use your own router. And order about 2x more bandwidth than you think you need to accommodate provider "marketing inflation", loading, and sub-par nodes.
Click to expand...

Amen to that. After a couple of seasons of high school sports remotes, I have found that IP is incredibly unpredictable, wireless IP, doubly so. I have run into trouble with Verizon LTE choking even when running large buffers (1 to 2 seconds worth). It seems like when it tanks, it tanks badly, losing audio for several seconds at a time. If I find in-house public Wi-Fi, and they don't have it firewalled to oblivion to where my codec won't connect, it's even worse as everyone there is on it too using their smartphones.

Non-VoIP POTS lines that will work with a codec are hard to find as well. It seems like the best option left for the local sports remote is the old fashioned Marti unit.
 
Still use Marti for the home games, and some of the away games where I can hit the repeater on the tower. But, some of the schools are just not line of sight and/or 35+ miles away which doesn't work. Used to run POTS for the Blue Box, but then all the schools went over to VOIP, and the Blue Box does NOT like VOIP.

The problem with public WiFi is just that, everybody and their brother is on it at the same time. Ditto for 3G/4G... when you get a large enough crowd, all surfing, texting, tweeting and Facebook-ing it goes to hell really fast. Which is precisely the reason that streaming "radio" won't replace regular broadcasting anytime soon.

There aren't a lot of options left now that POTS is dying and ISDN is soon to be dead for rock-solid remotes.
 
Don't the carriers have to get permission to discontinue a tariffed service?
If so, did we miss something filed w/the FCC?
Can "WE" file a complaint about this?
 
I wonder if reliability is a regional thing.

Having spent the bulk of my years with non-digital leased lines, I'm still not totally comfortable with audio loops over IP. Still, it's treated me pretty well, especially with the insane problems we've had with the APT-based digital loops recently.

Here in the Seattle area, I have 26 audio "circuits", going between Seattle, Renton, Sumner, Tacoma, Lakewood, Olympia, Shelton and Bremerton. In all but two cases, the links are connected through Century Link DSL services. The exceptions use Comcast broadband. I'm using them for STL, Studio-to-automation, satellite audio-to-automation, remotes and to move EAS audio around.

I have a daily show, coming up from San Francisco on a Bric-Link. The local circuits are all on Barix boxes. I'm feeding an AM-Over-FM on public utility fiber and a couple of Bric-Links.

These links seem to work best when you can stay in the phone company's network. Except for a couple of modem failures, I've had just about zero problems.


The best part is that, as long as your DSL is running, you have control over everything else. I've experienced having to go through the phone company's repair gauntlet, then wait 6 hours for a tech to tell me it'll take at least the day to find where the cards are.
 
Does anyone know if Tieline will work on a VOIP setup like you find in most schools? I know Bluebox doesn't but have heard many people say Tieline is more reliable and I was hoping the Tieline equipment had some other design to work on VOIP. Anybody?
 
VOIP is a codec on top of a codec. The POTS codecs were made to work with minimal interference. The G.711 codec on most long distance circuits was "soft" enough that it could pass the audio for the codec modem to work. It was also a frame relay, at least for long distance (local loops were analog) so there was no jitter, delay or packets arriving out of order.

VOIP is subject to the vagaries of the internet.
 
POTS codecs will not work reliably on VoIP lines. The Tieline will be no different than Comrex on this.

One of my clients uses Tieline extensively for sports remotes. One of the gyms changed from a straight POTS line to an ATA connected to their IP phone system...the station found out the hard way at game time. We use a Remote Mix Sport at that locale now and deal with phone-quality sound. Most other sites either have a good POTS line or hard-wired Ethernet. The station has a couple of iMix/Commander boxes and the Tieline Ethernet connections have worked out pretty well.
 
We have an InterTel/Mitel 3000 phone system on a couple BRI circuits. Pleasantly surprised that the ATA ports work with all the Comrex POTs devices. Port to port up to 33.6! Use an ATA line in engineering to bench test everything from the HotLine to the Access POTs.

Tried another brand to replace the "copper" for the studio phone systems and CODEC use was a total failure. Forget what it was. Not fiber (yet) but each multiple ATA device used 5 copper pairs.

This last Basketball season we ran into a couple facilities that didn't work with POTSs codecs. The ISDN backup was voice grade.

I get surprised when we do use a Marti as a primary link for a remote. Usually it's just a backup. Using a Marti and the FM subcarrier IFB "is a hassle" what with setting up the antennas etc....

They just did a remote with a primary Access on the stores wired internet and a backup Access on a WiFi hotspot. Wired delays from the remote were 120mS (pgm) / 47 mS (IFB). Hotspot was a mess 1,200 mS / 250 mS BUT their laptop & iPad shared the WiFi connection and both of those also had issues.
 
Being on the receiving end of IP codec support calls, believe me, I understand engineers' frustration with IP technology. I also am responsible for engineering at 8 radio stations - all rural, too.

At NAB, I'm giving a white paper about some different techniques to obtain much better reliability for IP-Audio over the Public Internet. If you'll be at NAB, please come to this session. It's this Sunday, April 7, at 1pm PDT, in room S227 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

A couple weeks after the session, we'll have the paper posted on the Telos Blog page...
http://telosalliance.com/blog

Meanwhile, to perhaps give you some hope that high-quality IP-audio is doable - both for remotes and for full-time, primary STL, please have a look at these two articles, written by your engineering peers...

IP-Audio for full-time primary STL... at 7 transmitter sites...
http://radioworld.com/article/joy-fm-enjoys-the-sound-of-the-z-ip/214740

IP-Audio for a long weekend music remote - over 4G - in rural California...
http://www.thebdr.net/articles/audio/codecs/RI-ZIPOne.pdf


Best,
Kirk
VP-Telos
 
It was about 10 years ago I first heard about Verizon discontinuing BRI (as I recall it was Tom Ray who was told this at that time). So, we shall see.

However ISDN PRI (23B+D) is still alive and well (for now at least) and is heavily used by business PBX users. For something like the Super Bowl it is a very simple matter to buy a PRI, break it into multiple BRIs, use as many as needed and sell the rest of them to someone else.

If you need this service contact Steve Kirsch at Silver Lake Audio in NY and he can rent you the equipment or just do it turn key for you.

Rolf
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom