newsletter://mv.com November 1999 New backbone connectivity Our long-awaited UUnet backbone connection arrived on November 8. In addition to adding more bandwidth, this provides us with more routing diversity. Routing diversity means that there are multiple paths for you to reach other sites on the Internet (and with more paths, it's easier for the best one to be used). It also means that an outage on any of our back- bone connections or, for that matter, of any routing problems on any of the major backbones that we deal with, will have less impact on you. Multiple redundant connections is a major benefit that we offer - we help isolate you from the failures that all of the major backbones experience from time to time. Holiday special During the holidays we will be waiving our setup fees for new standard dialup accounts (tell your friends!). The way it works is this: for new dialup accounts we require a $50 non-refundable deposit. Normally $10 of this covers a setup fee, and the remaining $40 is credited to the new account against future billing (note that we request that the deposit be sent in during the a two-week trial period after the new customer is sure that they want to keep the account). For the holiday special, for any deposit that we receive from now through January 15, 2000 all $50 of the deposit will be credited to the account - the $10 setup fee will not be charged. Want an MV mug ? We get a lot of compliments whenever we happen to bring one of our MV mugs into the light of day, so we figured we'd make them available. Many people seem to like the minimalist style: they are gloss white with our black-and-red logo and the "mug.mv.com" label (if you are left-handed they say "mug.mv.net"). A mug can be yours for $10.00 and we'll even pay the shipping to anywhere in New England. For a look and for more information, go to "http://mug.mv.com/". The end of the 90's and into Y2K This is likely the our last newsletter of the year and thus of the 1990s (we'll resist the temptation to talk about the century or the mil- lenium lest we trigger some backlash about what year marks the end of each decade/century/millenium). Our MV.COM domain has been operating since 1987, and we incorporated as a business in 1991; we've seen a lot of changes in the Internet and a number of milestone events. Just a few of our many musings about what we've seen: * In the beginning we'd go around [mainly southern] NH talking to any group that would listen about this unheard-of Internet thing. Most people could not understand how they would benefit from things like email access, yet once they had it could not understand how they lived without it. In just a few years Internet became part of mainstream knowledge. We remember when it was quite unusual to see an email address used outside of technical circles, for example on a business card or in an advertisement, and what a shock it used to be to see a URL on a commercial product (one of the first we recall was on a bot- tle of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay). * At first, only a few technically savvy people ran SLIP or PPP on their home computer, and thus did not run any Internet-related software. Most people used either UUCP (for batch email) or dialed into a UNIX shell account to access text-only Internet services. Anything non- textual would have to be downloaded and dealt with offline. With the advent of easy-to-use SLIP and PPP software on the user end, and an increasing variety of remote access equipment on the ISP end, and spurred on by the spread of the World Wide Web, most users migrated to using IP connections. * "gopher" was once the primary interface for hypertext information. With the development of HTTP and HTML and the spread of the World Wide Web, along with freely available web browsers, gopher was relegated to a minor role even by the mid-1990s. * The "archie" and "veronica" tools were the best way to find things on the Internet (on FTP archives and in gopher servers). As WWW became popular there naturally arose a need for ways to find things there, too. Search engines such as the "yahoo" page at Stanford led to... well, you know where they led. * When we opened for business in 1991, the 14.4Kbps V.32bis modem stan- dard was fairly well established, yet most people were still using 1200 and 2400 baud modems. Over the years we saw a continual evolu- tion in modem technologies: from proprietary protocols pushing the 14.4Kbps barrier (e.g. Zyxel 16.8Kbps and Telebit 23K asymmetrical protocol) to 28.8K V.34 and later 33.6K V.34, and then to the X2 and K56flex battle leading to the eventual V.90 standard. Each modem advance brought its own trials and tribulations. Converting our modem pools from V.32bis to V.34, and then from V.34 to V.90 were, for us, significant undertakings. * For the first few years we knew every customer's account number by heart, and you might be surprised to know that for quite a while we folded and stuffed bills and newsletters by hand around Marta's dining room table. (We've improved: we now use a paper folder and stuff envelopes around a conference table.) * We started out with a 9.6Kbps leased line connection to NEARnet (the regional NSFnet provider at the time) at what was a pretty enormous cost. (Actually due to a NEARnet mistake we started out with a 56Kbps line, but the mistake was corrected and we operated on a 9.6Kbps line for some months.) This was surprisingly workable, although perhaps not so surprising when you realize there was no WWW at the time. We moved back to 56Kbps in fairly short order, and soon made the leap to a full T1 and eventually to multiple T1s. * When we started, the Internet backbone was run under contract by the NSF (National Science Foundation), with a commercial backbone run by ANS just forming in parallel (in general using the same facilities as the NSF backbone). Because it was government funded, there was a prohibition against using the NSF backbone for commercial traffic; in order to send commercial traffic to another site one had to warrant that both sites could connect via the ANS commercial backbone and had legitimate access to that backbone. (The situation was more complex than that but this is a short paragraph.) Over time, other commercial carriers such as Sprintlink and MCI became viable and NSF left the picture (but not before helping to ensure that the commercial networks would interconnect), and all prohibitions against commercial traffic were removed. * One striking change we've seen is not a single item, but the effect of additive changes on the requirements of customer support. As the years have gone by we have added more and more services, and advancing technology has brought more and more kinds of software and hardware and a huge number of applications that use the Internet. Our Customer Support staff has continued adding to their knowledge while at the same time retaining the ability to support everything we've ever seen. New CS personnel encounter an ever-increasing learning curve when they come on board. It's a daunting challenge that they meet admirably, and our hats are off to them. * Perhaps the most significant change we have seen in the 1990s is the evolution of general Internet access from something only computer pro- fessionals had (or wanted) to its position now as a maturing industry. It was our goal that Internet access should be a common thing, that everyone should see the benefit of and participate in electronic com- munication - this was our goal even before the WWW - and we are proud to have been on the front of this successful movement. Some of you undoubtedly have questions about how the "Y2K bug" will affect your Internet connection. You can find our thoughts on this by going to our web page (www.mv.com") and looking in the Tools and Information for MV Users" section. The NHISPA In a prior newsletter we announced the New Hampshire ISP Association (the NHISPA), a non-profit group created for the common benefit of indepen- dent ISPs in New Hampshire. (One sure sign that an industry is maturing is the formation of industry associations.) The NHISPA had a kick-off confer- ence in early October at the Waterville Valley Conference Center; there we heard technical presentations, made worthwhile contacts with vendor representatives, and in general got to know each other better and work towards our mutual benefit. The NHISPA continues to address items of interest in the legislative and regulatory arenas. One such item is the NH Public Utilities Commission inquiry into telephone system congestion, which has broadened into discus- sions of the nature of future Bell Atlantic offerings that can continue to to be used on a retail basis by ISPs. Another is inquiry into the potential formation of an executive body that deals specifically in telecommunications issues. The NHISPA is also working on tangible member benefits including direct peering between members. In this context, two organizations are said to "peer" when they have a direct high-speed connection between them, and can exchange Internet traffic directly without going through a higher- level Internet backbone. We have great hopes for the peering project and believe it can help improve the flow of data not only between NHISPA members, but to other entities in New Hampshire and beyond. MV Communications, Inc. (603) 629-0000 .