Ameritech gears ISDN toward small businesses

Taking a break from the DSL hype, Ameritech plans to use ISDN to provide high-speed Internet access to small and medium-sized businesses with LANs.

The company's new ISDN LAN Internet service is aimed at offices with fewer than 25 locations on their LANs, said Terry Dean, senior manager for Internet product development at Ameritech.

At 128 kb/s, ISDN may not be as fast as DSL offerings entering the market, but it's farther-reaching, Dean said. "There are a lot of people announcing DSL, but not everybody is served by an area that can have DSL at this time," he said. "This gives those customers an opportunity to get fairly high-speed access at a reasonably low cost."

Dean predicts that companies will start with ISDN and migrate to DSL as it becomes available.

Various packages are available under the new service. A dynamic IP address is being offered to customers whose main objective is surfing the Internet. For companies seeking to run a small Web site or an e-mail server at their location, a static IP address option is available.

A business messaging service, for customers that don't want to run their own e-mail systems, can be added to either offering, Dean said. Prices range from $89.99 per month for a dynamic address without e-mail to $329.99 per month for a static IP address with 10 e-mail boxes.

Despite the buzz surrounding DSL and multiple previous attempts to get the technology off the ground, ISDN still has a place in the small office/home office market, said Francis Duffy, senior analyst with Communications Industry Researchers.

The technology's future, though, will depend on the carrier's marketing strategy. Because customers do not view ISDN as a spectacular service, they do not believe it deserves premium pricing, he said.

"In the history of ISDN, no American carrier has ever solved the puzzle of how to market it," Duffy said. "If they turn it into a commodity product, it could have a greater life span."