After installing a device and its accompanying software according to manufacturer instructions, your first challenge will be to get the TA configured for your office. Under Windows95 or Windows NT, you should find it registered and available under the Control Panel Network icon.

To manage the ISDN phone numbers of the ISPs or enterprise servers you plan to call, use Windows' Dial Up Networking accessory--essentially a phone book with tabs to manage subwindows for "Basic" information, "Server," logon "Script" and "Security."

At this point in the process, a phone call to your ISP's technical support desk (you'll probably have to ask around for an ISDN wizard) or enterprise network server specialist may be needed to learn the recommended connection protocol and security procedures. Here are some of the decisions you'll have to make:

· Authentication Most ISPs require only simple Password Authentication Protocol (PAP). Near the beginning of a call to your ISP, the Dial Up Networking accessory will pop up a "Password?" window and use this for PAP authentication to the server computer. Usually, this pass word also will get you into the Simple Mai l Transfer Protocol (SMTP) e-mail server. Enterprise intranet and extranet managers may impose more complex security--by using some form of Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) or a callback scheme. Most of the devices listed in the Buyer's Guide charts support this level of authentication if you ever need it.

· Bonding This is management of bandwidth on demand--adding B channels when needed to obtain maximum data transmission rate, or dropping one when an analog phone call is placed. In the early days of dial-up network access, a basic Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) was developed.

Then, with increasing interest in multichannel operations such as ISDN, a group of vendors, including Ascend Communications, Bay Networks, Cisco Systems, Microsoft Corp., Shiva, 3Com and Xylogics, got together to propose an interoperable way for everyone's PPP products to agree on how channels should be added and dropped to adapt to changing loads. The result was Bandwidth Allocation Control Protocol (BAC P). Today, this is most commonly identified as Multilink PPP in equipment feature lists and ISP connection options. If your ISP or enterprise server administrator doesn't offer this now, it's likely that they will soon.

· Compression Most TAs listed in the charts perform at least one type of on-the-fly data compression. However, few network administrators use this because it often causes more problems than it solves. Data compression has a negligible effect on throughput if the primary use of your connection is Web browsing. Most of the material that you'll be transferring already will be greatly compressed (ZIPped software releases, JPEG graphics and .WAV files). And considering that network performance usually is more limited by server response times than by present-day delivery channels (especially ISDN connections), data-compression mechanisms are largely viewed as solutions in search of a problem.

Pain for Gain There's been a recent, but explosive growt h of interest in ISDN that's been dri ven by a hunger for higher-speed access to the Internet. Telephone companies and manufacturers are scrambling for the business--they've made it much easier to select, provision, install and configure an ISDN TA. Just remember--the first connection is the hardest! After that, you will truly enjoy the cleanliness, speed and inherent reliability of ISDN in your SOHO.

Dave Brown is an independent consultant in videoconferencing, WANs and ISDN applications. He can be reached at dave@dbec.com.