newsletter://mv.com
                                 March 2003

                      MV's disappearing dialup numbers

     Most of you already know this: one day in the last week of February,
we were given about 24 hours notice that some of our dialup service was
being turned off over a billing issue with one of our suppliers.  Indeed
this issue was not a new one: we had been working to resolve it for perhaps
18 months, and in fact were told that we had an agreement in place as long
ago as last August.  Since then, we had continually pressed the vendor to
finalize the agreement as they promised they would.   We continued service
with the vendor because of the agreement we had reached.

     Without going into great detail, we feel that our long-term and honest
efforts to come to terms with this issue were abruptly and summarily dis-
carded.  The agreement we had in place would have benefited both parties.
With the action taken, no such benefit can be had: the vendor decided that
burning bridges was better than building them.  We still have this issue to
work out, and we expect that it will take considerable time and resources
to do so.  For our part, we will be dedicated to resolve it in a way that
is fair to both parties.

                      MV's reincarnated dialup numbers

     On the other hand, we were able to recover pretty well from the loss
of that set of dialup numbers.  We have always had multiple sets of access
numbers, provided by different carriers.  It's more expensive to maintain
multiple dialup pools in NH, but we've done this because we believe that
offering a choice of numbers benefits you: your call may work better using
one carrier than another.  When we lost one set of numbers, the others con-
tinued to work.  However we did lose a lot of capacity, so there was a
great deal of contention on the remaining numbers until...

     Within about 24 hours, we were able to arrange new service with
another telecom provider.  We were immediately able to get about 70% of the
amount of new service we wanted, and within a short time added some out-
sourced backup numbers as well.  Within about a week of this writing we
will be adding the rest of the native capacity and removing those backup
numbers.

     We greatly appreciate your patience during this transition.  Our cus-
tomer service representatives (and phone lines) were heavily tasked for a
while as you called us for help getting connected.  I believe that under
the circumstances they came through with flying colors.  One of the lessons
we learned, though, is that you need to be kept up to date with the various
alternative numbers that are available for you to call.  A simple reminder
now and then to print out the dialup number list and keep it handy will
probably go a long way.  (Note that we we are still working on a definitive
list that we can use to put into a nice reference format -- the following
paragraph helps explain why we're not quite ready.)

                           MV's new dialup coverage

     As part of our new dialup service agreement, we will be bringing you
dialup coverage in many parts of Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont.  It's
not quite here in time for this newsletter, but we expect it to be avail-
able around the end of March.

                            New DSL areas coming

     We're also pleased that we've received word of new DSL/V areas coming
to NH soon.  Some of these towns were scheduled for the first quarter but
were pushed back a month or so.  Others are new.  The list of new towns
that we are expecting is now:

     March/April:
          Franklin, North Conway, Plaistow, Plymouth, Jaffrey.

     May/June:
          Atkinson, Farmington, Hampstead, Kingston, Lancaster, Weirs,
          Woodstock.

     Later this year:
          Belmont, Bristol, Charlestown, Enfield, Epping, Glendale,
          Greenville, Hinsdale, Pittsfield, Raymond, Rye Beach, Sunapee,
          Troy, Waterville, Whitefield, Winchester.

Contact us if you wish to be placed on a waiting list so we can let you
know when service is available in the above towns.  Please remember that
DSL is available mainly to locations within about 3 miles of the central
office in each town where DSL is offered.

                             New mail software

     We talked a lot last time about the upcoming change in software on our
mail server.  On the whole, the software change went very well, and we are
very pleased with the way it has been operating.  This changeover happened
overnight the night before we had to deal with the dialup issues and so we
got a little sidetracked from some of the followon efforts.  However we
will be working on them anew, and expect to have some more to say next time.

MV Communications, Inc.   PO Box 4963, Manchester, NH  03108    (603) 629-0000
.