newsletter://mv.com January 2000 Single number service During the first part of this year we will be testing a new "single number service" offering from Bell Atlantic. With this service, we will have a single 1-500-xxx-xxxx telephone number that will act as a local call to any Bell Atlantic customer in New Hampshire. We expect to start testing in late January or early February and hope that you will help us in trying it out. If it works well, we expect to be continuing it after the test period. This service: * Provides another state-wide dialin number to complement our Brooks ("BNH") numbers. By having an alternative, you may find that one of these numbers works better for you than the other; * Will allow us to have Bell Atlantic dialin service throughout the state; * Has the potential of addressing some of the issues with customers of independent telephone companies who can call Bell Atlantic numbers but who can not call our BNH numbers as a local call. Further details will be posted on the news section of our web page (see below) and on our mv.forum.general newsgroup as it becomes available. New Bandwidth (C+W) As you know, last November we added bandwidth to the Internet backbone by getting a UUNet T1 connection. In the latter part of January we will be turning up another T1, this one via Cable and Wireless. Cable and Wireless took over the operation of the MCI Internet backbone, which was (and is) one of the top carriers. This will add more bandwidth and even more diver- sity and redundancy than we already offer. POP closures We've finally cancelled three of our analog dialup pools; these can- cellations were scheduled for last fall but a certain amount of inertia kept them open longer than we predicted. These were older analog pools which have long since been superseded by other numbers (notably the BNH numbers) offering V.90 and ISDN dialins as well as supporting normal modem dialup. Analog modem pools cancelled in early January were: * LNH (Litchfield), at 424-7428; * DNH (Dover), at 740-9152; * Litchfield telebit UUCP, at 429-1735 (this was a very small pool sup- porting a particular modem brand that was popular in the early 1990s, primarily for UUCP access). Please see the access numbers on our web page for numbers that you can call; with our BNH numbers (and with the single number service described above) most callers have a choice of local numbers that can be used to reach us. Local peering On the Internet, some information that you want might be geographi- cally far away, and some other information might be local. Since there are a number of ISPs in New Hampshire providing content, it often makes sense for us to help distribute the flow of local data by establishing peering relationships with other ISPs in the area whereby we exchange Internet packets locally instead of sending them through more remote backbones. Some local ISPs have indeed established an ad hoc peering group - these include MV, Destek, JLC net, FCG networks, and others, and we expect more to be included over the coming months. Litchfield closing We first opened for business in June 1991 in a barren office space in Litchfield, NH. Even though we moved our main office to downtown Manches- ter in June 1997, we kept some service in Litchfield. This service included dialin modems and some high speed connections both for our own backbone and for connections to customers. Since 1997 we have been moving services away from the Litchfield hub, and by the end of January 2000 we expect that no services will be remaining there. Litchfield served us well: in 1991 it was a good choice for our first location since it offered a local call across a wide range of communities in the Nashua/Manchester corridor. Because of the telephone facilities that we rapidly consumed there, NYNEX soon ran a fiber conduit directly into one of our back rooms and installed some rather large equipment there to providing an interface to the fiber. As our needs for technical and human facilities became more advanced, the rural location became less optimal, thus we moved and thus we are now terminating our presence in Litchfield. Frame relay move The final service moved out of Litchfield is expected to be our Frame Relay service. (Frame relay is a high-speed dedicated connection that is used primarily by business customers.) Our Frame Relay service has been operated out of our Litchfield location since we started offering it in 1995, but by the time you read this it should have been moved to our Man- chester location. NHISPA happenings The NHISPA (New Hampshire ISP Association) was formed last year as a non-profit association of ISPs in New Hampshire. NHISPA members are actively interested in working together to continue to improve the state of the Internet in New Hampshire. (MV Communications is a founding member.) The NHISPA continues to grow, adding new members every quarter. Over the past few months the NHISPA has continued to participate in the Public Utilities Commission's docket on telephone system congestion. Note that ISPs in New Hampshire have a real love/hate relationship with Bell Atlantic, since BA provides many of the underlying services needed for Internet operation and since BA has some interest in closing off some of these services to competition, especially since they have begun taking notice of the Internet. The NHISPA has made several filings in this docket with the goal of opening up some of these services. The NHISPA has also begun efforts to give us better access to other parts of the state government; this is the sort of thing that a trade asso- ciation can accomplish better than its individual members. We also expect that the NHISPA will help to communicate to Internet users the things that are going on at the state level that relate to the Internet. Another NHISPA role may be to help foster the kind of local peering relationships mentioned earlier. MV web page Just a reminder to use our web page (www.mv.com) as a resource. There you can find: * Information about things we offer that you might not know about, such as web pages that every dialup account holder can have, tools to help you run your web page, other kinds of services we offer, etc.; * Reports about outages (including scheduled outages and reports of past outages); * News about happenings at MV; * Usage policies; * ClariNet news - a real world newspaper on our web server; and so forth. Our web page will soon be undergoing some slight changes to make it easier for you to jump directly to many specific interest areas. mv.com PO Box 4963, Manchester, NH 03108 (603) 629-0000 .