Best ISDN Product

DigiBoard Sets The ISDN World On Fire

Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is finally getting the attention it deserves: The service is priced competitively and is available in more places than ever before. Now the market focus has shifted to the products that can bring the benefits of ISDN to the corporation and the consumer. While there are PRI-based products that excel in centralized corporate or LAN-to-LAN applications, our choice for this year's Well-Connected product goes to the single-user product that offers the most functionality for the least cost.
We expect additional improvements in all the products in this newly fired-up market in the coming year. With such products offering ISDN's high bandwidth and instantaneous connect times, telecommuting is becoming a viable and easy option for many office workers. Plus, we have to admit, surfing the net is definitely better at 128 Kbps!
For now, the best value in single-user ISDN connectivity is DigiBoard's DataFire (formerly the PC-IMAC). A single Basic Rate Interface (BRI) ISA bus card with a built-in NT1, this DigiBoard product offers the right price for a variety of uses. DigiBoard has recently added Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) support for Internet connectivity using TCP/IP, yet it also supports NetWare and NT RAS remote access with protocol optimizations at full 128-Kbps speeds with compression.
Because it's a PC card, the DataFire can't support Macintosh clients directly, but there is an external bridge product from DigiBoard to handle this. On the other hand, no other product can do as many things for a PC client with so little footprint. Performance, while not quite as fast as Combinet and others in our tests, certainly was good. Compression could be improved, though all the products are waiting for compression negotiation protocols and algorithms to be standardized in the PPP world.

DigiBoard DataFire, $595, DigiBoard, 6400 Flying Cloud Dr., Eden Prairie, MN 55344. (800) 344-4273; fax (612) 943-5398.

Runners-Up
EVERYWARE family of ISDN
remote LAN access products,
Combinet, 333 W. El Camino Real,
Sunnyvale, CA 94087.
(408) 522-9020; fax (408) 732-5479.

WaveRunner, IBM Corp., Networking Hardware, P.O. Box 12195, 3039 Cornwallis Rd.,
473-500, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. (800) IBM-4YOU;
fax (800) IBM-4FAX.