See an unfamiliar term? Check the newsletter glossary.
newsletter://mv.com
March 1999
In this newsletter
If you were observant and you can remember back that far, you may
recall that last month's billing did not have a newsletter. It wasn't that
we didn't have anything to say, more that we neglected to reserve the time
to say it. Naturally that leaves us with an abundance of topics to pick
from for this newsletter. You'll find a discussion of some things going on
in the government that may affect your use of the Internet, both state and
local; some reports regarding facilities at MV; and upcoming changes that
may affect you.
At the Public Utilities Comission in New Hampshire
In mid-February we were notified of an Order of Notice by the PUC,
signaling an investigation by the PUC into reported telephone congestion in
New Hampshire. The Commission is (rightfully) concerned about lack of
access to the public telephone system especially as it affects safety, for
example in making E-911 calls. As you can see in the Order[1], much of the
focus of the investigation is on making the use of the telephone system for
Internet calls, and recommendations towards modifying the use of the tele-
phone system for Internet traffic. As this investigation could conceivably
have an impact on dialup Internet use, MV filed a petition [2] to be
granted intervener status, which would give us a potential role in the pro-
cess. If you want to read more about and comment on this investigation,
you can go to a web-based forum [3] set up by Destek for that purpose.
At the FCC
Much has been made lately of a ruling by the FCC relating to whether
calls to an ISP are local. The ruling has been widely misreported and mis-
rumored as a ruling on rates that you pay when you call an ISP. In fact it
was a rather bland ruling, mainly dealing with the way that telephone com-
panies compensate each other. This issue, known as reciprocal compensa-
tion, has been hotly contested between ILECs (the independant local
exchange carrier, in other words the telephone companies such as Bell
Atlantic who are well established in specific areas) and CLECs (competitive
local exchange carriers, the new telephone companies who moved into those
areas when local telephone service was opened up to competition).
The way reciprocal compensation works is like this: if you sign up to
get local telephone service from a CLEC (a new competitive telephone com-
pany), then whenever someone makes a call to you that originates in an ILEC
(the incumbent company), then the ILEC has to pay the CLEC for terminating
the call - that is, for handing the call's destination. This is a fee that
was originally championed by the big ILECs, who assumed that they would be
the only ones operating switches and terminating calls, for example from
cellular telephone companies. But with the rapid growth of CLECs, espe-
cially those that are specifically marketing to ISPs, the ILECs find them-
selves on the paying side of reciprocal compensation and have been balking
at making the payments.
The FCC ruling[4], while it appears to come from rather muddled logic,
mostly declares that the issue of reciprocal compensation can be under
Federal jurisdiction. While the ruling specifically stated that all exist-
ing interconnection agreements must be honored, many people see it simply
as a foot in the door, preparing the way for future decisions regarding
reciprocal compensation and Internet traffic.
How does this affect you? If reciprocal compensation is eliminated or
reduced for calls to ISPs, the CLECs that cater to ISPs will lose one reve-
nue source and would probably change their pricing to ISPs. At present the
FCC has reiterated that it does not want to do anything that will stifle
the growth of the Internet or in any way result in increase rates for cal-
ling ISPs. That position could, of course, change.
Increased bandwidth
Last fall we obtained additional Internet bandwidth from BBNPlanet
(GTE Internetworking). This new bandwidth came in in late November and was
up for about 10 days, at which point BBNPlanet requested that our formal
turnup be delayed until they could improve their Nashua/Boston link.
Though they expected to have us back up by the end of the year, the delay
lasted until mid-February. At that time the connection was reinstated and
has been up and running since then.
Dialup ports and remote POPs
It was about a year ago that we contracted with Brooks Fiber (now
Brooks/Worldcom) to provide us circuits for dialup services supporting V.90
and ISDN as well as normal V.34 and other modem calls. With this we began
the process of migrating our dialup services away from the older analog
modems served at various remote locations and over to the digital circuits
served out of all new equipment at our central location. We planned on
carrying both infrastructures for some time, and reducing the analog modem
pools fairly rapidly while building up the digitally served pools.
For a combination of reasons the transition away from POPs stretched
longer than anticipated. For one thing, delivery problems with Brooks over
the summer and into late fall meant that we could not transition as quickly
as we wanted. For another, the V.90 implementations were evolving and went
through some typical early-life problems (and in fact are still maturing).
Maintaining the POPs with analog modems as well as the new digital
dialin pools presented us with a significant duplication of costs: main-
taining a POP is fairly expensive even with a reduced number of modems. We
felt that it was proper to have this duplication for a fairly long period
in order to provide for minimal disruption to our customers while also
investing in providing new high speed protocols. But this period, as we
say, extended longer than we planned on.
All this is a long-winded introduction to the fact that we are prepar-
ing to close down some of our remaining POPs: Litchfield, Salem, Peterbor-
ough, and Dover. The Salem and Peterborough POPs will be closed down by
middle to late April; Litchfield and Dover during the summer. If you are
dialing into analog modems at one of these POPs, you will need to change to
one of our other local numbers (probably one of the Brooks "bnh" numbers or
our Nashua Bell Atlantic numbers).
Our Nashua POP will not be closed down but will be changed a little:
we will be eliminating the analog dialup numbers by the end of March while
expanding the Bell Atlantic V.90 (digital) ports there. We are looking
into keeping the analog number (886-6688) but mapping it into the V.90
group, and will do so if we can.
We do not have definite plans regarding the Concord and Manchester
POPs; we have an interest in keeping both of them, and an especially strong
interest in keeping a Concord Bell Atlantic access number since it provides
our only local dialup for users in surrounding towns served by independent
telephone companies.
Please note that this does not in any way represent a scaling down of
our operations, quite the opposite. We have invested heavily in migrating
to equipment and circuits that provide V.90 and ISDN services, connected to
the trunk side of the telco switches for optimal access. We've carried the
POPs with analog modems at great expense and for an extended period, and
it's simply time to let them go. We appreciate the help of everyone who
has converted to using the new access numbers.
Staff updates
We're sorry to report that one of our senior Customer Service employ-
ees, Mark Drewel (you may also recognize him as "docwho") has left MV.
Mark helped us out greatly while he was here and we will miss him.
At the same time we'd like to welcome Michael Ursitti to our Customer
Service staff. Mike has a background in music and in customer service and
we trust that he will fit in well.
URLs
[1] http://www.puc.state.nh.us/99020ont.html
[2] http://www.mv.com/mv/enh/userinfo/announcements/news.shtml
[3] http://hypernews.destek.net/nhpuc/
[4] http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/News_Releases/1999/nrcc9014.html
MV Communications, Inc. (603) 629-0000