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newsletter://mv.com
September 1997
New lines + ISDN
Over the last month or so we have added capacity in Nashua by instal-
ling new dialin lines and modems. In addition to this we've installed a
small ISDN hunt group in Nashua for trial. If you have an ISDN modem and
an IP account that uses the PPP protocol, you can dial the Nashua ISDN hunt
group at 889-8921 using a single B channel at 64Kbps. But be sure that you
are aware of the telephone company's ISDN charges that you will incur: in
most cases you will incur a per-minute usage charge when you make an ISDN
data connection. Note that in some of our service areas we can offer dedi-
cated 64Kbps or 128Kbps ISDN dialup service with no per-minute usage
charges.
Important info about the Litchfield POP
There are several things we'd like to let you know about the Litch-
field POP. Many if not all of these items have been brought up on our web
page and in the various mv newsgroups.
Some of you are dialing a Manchester or a Nashua number to get into
the Litchfield POP. 888-NETS (888-6387) in Nashua and 645-NETS (645-6387)
in Manchester are numbers which forward your call to Litchfield. These are
old numbers that we established, so that if you were local to Manchester or
Nashua but not local to Litchfield, you could call one of those numbers and
reach our Litchfield location. But now our Nashua and Manchester POPs have
been up and running for some time, and there really should be no need for
anyone to be calling the call forwarding numbers. If you are calling one
of them, please contact us to get your account moved to either Manchester
or Nashua -- you'll almost certainly get better results by avoiding the
call-forwarding loop.
Our first access location was in Litchfield, but over time we added
local dialin service in a number of other locations including Salem, Man-
chester, and Nashua. We have recently moved our staff offices out of
Litchfield as well, so the Litchfield access node has become somewhat
superfluous for most of our users. However, you may not be aware of the
other alternatives. If you currently use the Litchfield location, but you
are also local to one of our other nodes, consider trying one of those
other nodes. You may find that it gives you better results. (There are
indeed people, including at least two on our staff who live in Litchfield,
who get the best results dialing Litchfield. However, many others report
better connections using Manchester, Salem, or Nashua.) Over time, we hope
that many users will migrate from using Litchfield to using other MV loca-
tions, and we expect to reduce the size of our Litchfield dialin pool
accordingly, and in fact started this process by removing 10 lines in early
September. As always, check with the telephone company to be sure you are
not incurring long-distance charges when dialing any of our locations.
Finally regarding Litchfield, we will be relocating our equipment from
one office area to another, smaller area in that building. This will occur
some time in the first half of October, and will require some down time.
Watch our web page and our newsgroups for specific announcements.
56Kb access
We get a lot of inquiries about our plans to support the new 56Kb
modem access technologies. We've avoided giving any solid answers until we
could get a feel for the direction of the technology and how that direction
meshes with our existing equipment and infrastructure. And certainly the
multiple directions in this area have given us a lot to do: many things to
consider and plans to make.
If you don't know: there are two major competing implementations of
56Kb dialup access. One is the X2 technology from US Robotics, and the
other is a joint effort of Lucent, Rockwell, and others called K56flex.
Both of these implementations have been submitted to the ITU for considera-
tion as an eventual standard, and it's likely that the standard will not be
purely one or the other. It's also likely that once the standard is out,
both of these divergent implementations will more or less fade out in favor
of the standard. The only real worries of users and providers are: what
do we use now, and can we upgrade to the standard once it is out?
MV will be moving to adopt the K56flex technology. All equipment that
we have purchased since early 1997 is upgradable to this technology. We
expect to phase this in by adding new 56Kb dialin access to our locations
over time - i.e., some of our nodes will be upgraded before others. For
each upgraded location, it is probable that we will initially have separate
dialin numbers for 56Kb access and traditional V.34 access.
Staff changes
Several staff changes have occurred lately that we'd like to tell you
about:
* Donald Dunn, a Customer Service Representative, has left our full-time
staff to further his education. He will be continuing to help us out
with some part-time background work.
* Tom Albright is now helping us out in the accounting department on
what we trust will be a long-term basis. Tom is a contractor
representing his company, Albright Enterprises.
* Erin McKee has joined us as a part-time Customer Service representa-
tive. Erin is a high school student who will be interning with us.
MV still has openings: check out our web page for more information.
Things Upcoming
* We will be replacing our mail server in October. The new system is
already in house and is being configured; our mail server requires a
lot of customer software changes and we need to get them all squared
away before the new system is put into place. The new server will
feature more memory, a bigger CPU, and bigger and faster disks.
Please make sure you are accessing the mail and POP servers by the
official names (e.g. mail.mv.net or pop.mv.net) and not by its under-
lying system name or IP number, as those will be changing!
* We have plans to upgrade our Usenet news server, and hope to have this
in place by the end of the year. We hope to approximately triple the
disk capacity of this server, and to significantly increase the news
performance as well.
Did you know?
* If you have an MV IP or shell account, you can access real world news
stories, comics, editorials, business news -- all on MV's computers.
The ClariNet news service provides a daily electronic newspaper.
Access it via our news server by reading the clari.* groups, or go to
our web page (www.mv.com) and read ClariNet on our web server.
* You can have a telnet-only shell account for half the price of a dia-
lin account. With a telnet-only shell account, you must access the
shell account from another Internet node, and not use the dialin lines --
for example, you may telnet to our server from your work system, or
you might telnet to your shell account while using your IP account for
access.
* Every shell account and IP account can have a home page on our web
server. See the Extended Information for MV Users on our web page for
details.
* You can find out items of interest to you and your account by reading
the news and announcements sections of our web page, and by reading
the mv newsgroups on our news server.
MV Communications PO Box 4963, Manchester, NH 03108 (603) 629-0000