Packet Data Systems was formed in 1991 to supply European telecommunication test products to a market dominated by high value American products. The capabilities of the European products were identical and in some cases better but the cost was much lower so the market responded with great enthusiasm.

The most powerful product we had was our Clarinet protocol test system comprising of a range of physical interfaces which connect to a laptop PC host running an application to simulate many telecom protocols including DASS2, DPNSS, ISDN, Q-SIG, V5.1, V5.2, SS#7, H.323, SIP and SIPi which were used by all the major telecom operators, the government, ministry of defence and many companies manufacturing and testing PBX or Switch harware. Many thousands of Clarinet systems have been sold with full support and product training offered by PDS internationally.

PDS also soon became a manuafacturer of our own range of ISDN network simulators which could be used to demonstrate two ISDN basic rate video conferencing terminals, two ISDN telephones or two ISDN data terminals working back-to-back. You can find information leaflets for our B-Link unit which had two ISDN basic rate S-T or 2B1Q U interfaces, and our Simline 6 which has six ISDN basic rate S-T interfaces and one optional ISDN primary rate E1 interface on this web page and they can sometimes be purchsed on eBay. These became very popular and we were asked by the government to build products based on our design to fill more complex applications resulting in the sale of hundreds of these products all over the world.

In 2015 a number of companies got together and decided to share the development of their own products in order to avoid spending too much money. One of the first products they produced was called Wireshark which is an excellent protocol analyser but when they finished, they decided to put it on to the internet and let anyone download it free-of-charge so the market was destroyed damaging PDS and many of our competitors.

We still had protocol simulators to sell but fewer people were using this approach, and soon another product called SIPp was released. SIPp is a protocol simulator for the session initiation protocol and this too was put on to the internet free-of-charge. The only prodcuts we had left now were Protocol Conformance Testers which could be used to automatically generate messages to all connected devices and check their responses, a correct responce would result in a 'PASS' verdict and a wrong response would result in a 'FAIL' verdict. These systems offered a perfect way to point fingers at devices which were not in full compliance of the protocol but were very expensive so therefore the market was too small.

Goodbye and thank you for your business from the Packet Data Systems team.