BT Highway - Distinctive Hardware

Distinctive Hardware

BT Highway was provided as a wall-mounted panel that supplemented an analogue master socket. A blank faceplate was placed across the analogue master socket so that all connections had to be performed through the panel.

BT Highway was distinctive because, unlike most ISDN services, it was aimed at both home and small business users, and incorporated both analogue sockets (coloured white) and ISDN sockets (coloured blue). It was possible to plug in both Cat5 ISDN equipment and traditional POTS analogue telephones at the same time into the same master panel; normally an ISDN master panel provides only ISDN sockets. As with a standard ISDN2e service, it was possible to mix and match concurrent connections to provide two concurrent analogue phone calls, one analogue phone call and one ISDN 64kbit/s call, two 64 kbit/s ISDN calls or one 128 kbit/s ISDN call. The analogue sockets were standard UK BS6312 sockets and included a ring capacitor.

Unlike an analogue master socket, BT Highway required external power from a mains electric adaptor. However, in the event of a power cut, the system still allowed analogue telephone calls to be made through the first analogue socket.

Connection to the Internet was typically performed either by a dedicated ISDN router or by an ISDN PCI card. Later versions of BT Highway provided a USB port which PCs could connect to; a driver CD was supplied and the device was seen as an ISDN modem by Windows. As with ISDN2e, most brands of device typically allowed the user to automatically connect and drop the second ISDN channel to switch between 64 kbit/s and 128 kbit/s, depending on whether one channel was already being used (for example, for a simultaneous analogue telephone call).