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newsletter://mv.com
December 1996
Note: text copies of all issues of the monthly newsletter can be found
on mv in the public archive; look in /pub/mv/inews. They're also in the
online menu!
Great Power Outage of 1996
On Saturday December 8, NH and much of New England was struck by a
freak rain-and-snow-storm that had devastating effects on electric power
and telephone service in the region. MV's power went out during the
evening Saturday and one by one our battery backup power supplies
drained and shut down. The first glimmer of power service came back to
our location during the day on Monday; unfortunately this was only a
partial feed of our multi-phase supply and of the entire office, only
one outlet was found working at normal capacity. We used this outlet to
recharge the batteries and to run our telephone system. Full power was
finally restored late Tuesday afternoon, and we were back up and running
at around 6pm.
During much of the outage, MV staff was in the office to answer
telephones during the day (at night it was simply too cold for anyone to
remain). Until full power was restored, we only had two incoming voice
lines in operation - the other lines enter our facility via a NYNEX
fiber cabinet that had also lost power.
We were out for nearly 3 days. While we do not ordinarily issue
adjustments for service outages, a 3-day disruption is unusual and we
will be reducing December bills by 10%. Users who have prepaid for
dedicated dialup service will be extended for three days.
MV is NOT Merrimack Valley
Our name is MV Communications - there is also a company Merrimack
Valley Communications that continues to get calls intended for us. Usu-
ally we don't even hear about these mis-placed calls, but we heard from
them after the recent power outage. Please, when calling us make sure
you call us and not any other company with a similar name.
This bill
This billing covers the 4-month period from May 1 through August
31, 1996 (or for a portion of that period if your account was not active
for that entire period).
This represents the first bill that we're sending out under our
consolidated account-tracking system. Prior to this, each kind of ser-
vice that we billed for was kept track of in a different way -- some-
times (sad to say) by hand; our growth far exceeded our ability to keep
up with billing under that system (you may imagine the difficulty of
billing clients with combinations of services.) We still have a few
services classes that are yet to be integrated into the new system, but
those represent a fairly small fraction and they are being put into the
system as well.
When sending in your payment please be sure to include your account
number on your check or with your payment. This will help to ensure
that the payment is properly credited. Please note that the account
numbers are 9 characters: 6 digits, a hyphen, and 2 digits, e.g.
999999-88.
MV Operations moving
We expect to be moving our Customer Support and Operations center
in the first quarter of 1997. While we have not as of this writing yet
finalized a lease on the new location, we expect to do so within the
coming month. Watch for more details on our web page and on the mv
newsgroups.
New Web Rates Coming
We'd like to let you know that MV's rates for webpage hosting are
being significantly lowered, made possible in part by our new ability to
integrate them into our new billing system. The new rates will make it
much easier for you to have an exclusive server for your company or
organization, or for you to resell web space to your customers. We
don't have the final touches on the new rates so we don't want to print
them here, however they will be posted in the usual places soon (likely
by the time you see this). The rates will take effect retroactive to
December 1, 1996, so current web customers will find their charges
reduced as of that date.
Reminder: Important areas for MV users
All MV users should be aware of several areas to find information.
o Newsgroups: MV maintains several internal Usenet newsgroups for
announcements and discussions. (In fact, although they are MV
newsgroups, we do distribute them to some other ISPs in the area so
that outsiders can see what's happening in MV if they care to.)
The names of these newsgroups all start with "mv." and include:
mv.forum.general - a general discussion area to be used by MV
users.
mv.forum.dialip - A discussion area for IP account issues.
mv.forum.online - A discussion area for shell account issues.
mv.forum.web - A discussion area for web space issues.
mv.info.outages - Descriptions of outages, both announcements
and reports, posted by MV.
o Web: MV maintains two hierarchies on our web page for the benefit
of MV users:
http://www.mv.com/mv/userinfo - Information of general
interest. This includes policy statements, tips on how to use
various MV facilities, and announcements of upcoming events.
http://www.mv.com/webtools - Some tools to help make use of MV
facilities, focusing on helping you utilize web pages but also
containing some other things (such as an archive of the MV
newsgroups)
Be aware that if there are general announcements to be made by MV, these
are done through the newsgroups and through the announcements section of
our web page. To keep up on plans and happenings at MV, please check
into these periodically.
Happy Holidays from everyone at MV
Best wishes in the new year
MV Communications, Inc. (603) 429-2223