ml> there was as much or more of a market for 64k dual channel ISDN in 
 ml> the US as anywhere else in the world... too bad the US teleco bean 
 ml> counters are/were so st00pid 8?

 BP> dont know why there just was 56Kbit in us, in rest of the world it
 BP> have always being 64bit pr channel,

the US had both... it just depended on who your teleco was... they way they
got 56k is/was quite simple, too... it is called "bit-robbing"...
they were stealing one bit for every X many so they could build another
connection "for free"... we saw this bit-robbing being done on
regular POTS lines, too... some setups would never connect better then 9600
over their POTS lines, no matter how good the lines were or how good their
modem was... why? bit-robbing... they were encoding everything in 7 bits
which was redusing the max connect rate... that 8th bit? well, with 7 calls
going, those 7 8th bits from each gave the telco another call path that was
7 bits wide and they got it for free...

)\/(ark