MAS.632 Conversational Computer Systems - MIT OpenCourseWare

FURTHER READING
· eofTelephones 229
Although ISDN is attractive for many reasons, it will be slow to penetrate the
consumer market because digital telephone equipment is more expensive than
analog, and few residential customers require telecommunication services that
can benefit from ISDN's capabilities. At least in North America, the first wave
of ISDN deployment has been limited generally to select business environments.
Although the economics of wide-area networking or the need to merge voice
and data services dominate deployment decisions, business environments also
have the most to gain from integration of computers and telephones for call
management-which brings us to the topic of the next chapter.
There are a limited number of references that explain telecommunications technologies to a
broad audience. Chorafas presents a survey of of network technologies and weaves them into
their roles in an evolving global network Stallings presents ISDN in avery readable manner.
Briley focuses on details of switching in the telephone network, while Talley concentrates on
data communication protocols: both books are readable by a general audience but more
focused than was this chapter.