Schoolhouse ISDN only steps away from commodity status.

At what point is a technology truly accepted? Certainly when it's a commodity, when it trickles down to the least technical users. They know nothing about it but treat it as they do a light switch, flipping it without concern for the process by which electricity arrives at the bulb.

One other measure of acceptance: they feel inconvenienced when they have to do without it. The power (or cable TV) going out during a thunderstorm can make for a boring evening. And God forbid they should lose dial tone, at the office or at home.

Is ISDN to that point yet? Almost. There are clear indications it is closing in.

For instance, the public schools in Cincinnati, Ohio, are fully ISDN-capable, giving 55,000 students and 6,000 members a digital link to the outside world. It is an example of the technology doing the job routinely for those least technical users.

As part of a recent rate case, Cincinnati Bell donated a big chunk of the ISDN service to help the public schools' network upgrade project.

There are 83 schools, each with a basic rate link, and the wide area network includes eight primary rate facilities. The telco leases networking hardware to the schools, who pay for it with low-interest state loans or individual grants. Long-term school plans include local area networks at each site.

"The installation is a milestone, not only because of the scale and complexity of the application and organization it must unite, but because it underscores the saturation of ISDN services within our service area," says Craig Tesmer of Cincinnati Bell.

The schools' network, he insists, "is another sign of the growing acceptance of ISDN among local governments and businesses."

One big benefit of the network is improved administration. When all school paperwork was done manually, it took weeks to track students when about a third of them each year move around within the school district.

"If you don't know how many students are in a school, you don't know how many school lunches to provide, how many teachers to assign or how many buses to send," says David W. Hickey, network administrator for the school district.

Now the schools can get up-to-the-minute printouts on enrollment and attendance in each school, allowing administrators to spend less time pushing paper and more time on the bottom line-educating kids.

The network also provides E-mail access for teachers and staff and gives students the chance to learn via the Internet.

Illustrating the issue of ISDN nearing "commodity" status (by the measure of inconvenience if we have to do without it) was an interesting news item over the summer.

A collection of organizations, some technical and some not, lobbied the Federal Communications Commission on the subject of ISDN tariffing. Among the groups were the California Bankers Clearing House, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Consumer Federation of America, California ISDN Users Group and several industry associations.

As interesting as the mix of proponents was their argument that FCC's ISDN policy should be consistent with the goal of allowing the technology "to make this particular lane of the information superhighway accessible to millions of Americans as soon as possible."