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newsletter://mv.com
November 1999
New backbone connectivity
Our long-awaited UUnet backbone connection arrived on November 8. In
addition to adding more bandwidth, this provides us with more routing
diversity. Routing diversity means that there are multiple paths for you
to reach other sites on the Internet (and with more paths, it's easier for
the best one to be used). It also means that an outage on any of our back-
bone connections or, for that matter, of any routing problems on any of the
major backbones that we deal with, will have less impact on you. Multiple
redundant connections is a major benefit that we offer - we help isolate
you from the failures that all of the major backbones experience from time
to time.
Holiday special
During the holidays we will be waiving our setup fees for new standard
dialup accounts (tell your friends!). The way it works is this: for new
dialup accounts we require a $50 non-refundable deposit. Normally $10 of
this covers a setup fee, and the remaining $40 is credited to the new
account against future billing (note that we request that the deposit be
sent in during the a two-week trial period after the new customer is sure
that they want to keep the account). For the holiday special, for any
deposit that we receive from now through January 15, 2000 all $50 of the
deposit will be credited to the account - the $10 setup fee will not be
charged.
Want an MV mug ?
We get a lot of compliments whenever we happen to bring one of our MV
mugs into the light of day, so we figured we'd make them available. Many
people seem to like the minimalist style: they are gloss white with our
black-and-red logo and the "mug.mv.com" label (if you are left-handed they
say "mug.mv.net"). A mug can be yours for $10.00 and we'll even pay the
shipping to anywhere in New England. For a look and for more information,
go to "http://mug.mv.com/".
The end of the 90's and into Y2K
This is likely the our last newsletter of the year and thus of the
1990s (we'll resist the temptation to talk about the century or the mil-
lenium lest we trigger some backlash about what year marks the end of each
decade/century/millenium). Our MV.COM domain has been operating since
1987, and we incorporated as a business in 1991; we've seen a lot of
changes in the Internet and a number of milestone events. Just a few of
our many musings about what we've seen:
* In the beginning we'd go around [mainly southern] NH talking to any
group that would listen about this unheard-of Internet thing. Most
people could not understand how they would benefit from things like
email access, yet once they had it could not understand how they lived
without it. In just a few years Internet became part of mainstream
knowledge. We remember when it was quite unusual to see an email
address used outside of technical circles, for example on a business
card or in an advertisement, and what a shock it used to be to see a
URL on a commercial product (one of the first we recall was on a bot-
tle of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay).
* At first, only a few technically savvy people ran SLIP or PPP on their
home computer, and thus did not run any Internet-related software.
Most people used either UUCP (for batch email) or dialed into a UNIX
shell account to access text-only Internet services. Anything non-
textual would have to be downloaded and dealt with offline. With the
advent of easy-to-use SLIP and PPP software on the user end, and an
increasing variety of remote access equipment on the ISP end, and
spurred on by the spread of the World Wide Web, most users migrated to
using IP connections.
* "gopher" was once the primary interface for hypertext information.
With the development of HTTP and HTML and the spread of the World Wide
Web, along with freely available web browsers, gopher was relegated
to a minor role even by the mid-1990s.
* The "archie" and "veronica" tools were the best way to find things on
the Internet (on FTP archives and in gopher servers). As WWW became
popular there naturally arose a need for ways to find things there,
too. Search engines such as the "yahoo" page at Stanford led to...
well, you know where they led.
* When we opened for business in 1991, the 14.4Kbps V.32bis modem stan-
dard was fairly well established, yet most people were still using
1200 and 2400 baud modems. Over the years we saw a continual evolu-
tion in modem technologies: from proprietary protocols pushing the
14.4Kbps barrier (e.g. Zyxel 16.8Kbps and Telebit 23K asymmetrical
protocol) to 28.8K V.34 and later 33.6K V.34, and then to the X2 and
K56flex battle leading to the eventual V.90 standard. Each modem
advance brought its own trials and tribulations. Converting our modem
pools from V.32bis to V.34, and then from V.34 to V.90 were, for us,
significant undertakings.
* For the first few years we knew every customer's account number by
heart, and you might be surprised to know that for quite a while we
folded and stuffed bills and newsletters by hand around Marta's dining
room table. (We've improved: we now use a paper folder and stuff
envelopes around a conference table.)
* We started out with a 9.6Kbps leased line connection to NEARnet (the
regional NSFnet provider at the time) at what was a pretty enormous
cost. (Actually due to a NEARnet mistake we started out with a 56Kbps
line, but the mistake was corrected and we operated on a 9.6Kbps line
for some months.) This was surprisingly workable, although perhaps
not so surprising when you realize there was no WWW at the time. We
moved back to 56Kbps in fairly short order, and soon made the leap to
a full T1 and eventually to multiple T1s.
* When we started, the Internet backbone was run under contract by the
NSF (National Science Foundation), with a commercial backbone run by
ANS just forming in parallel (in general using the same facilities as
the NSF backbone). Because it was government funded, there was a
prohibition against using the NSF backbone for commercial traffic; in
order to send commercial traffic to another site one had to warrant
that both sites could connect via the ANS commercial backbone and had
legitimate access to that backbone. (The situation was more complex
than that but this is a short paragraph.) Over time, other commercial
carriers such as Sprintlink and MCI became viable and NSF left the
picture (but not before helping to ensure that the commercial networks
would interconnect), and all prohibitions against commercial traffic
were removed.
* One striking change we've seen is not a single item, but the effect of
additive changes on the requirements of customer support. As the
years have gone by we have added more and more services, and advancing
technology has brought more and more kinds of software and hardware
and a huge number of applications that use the Internet. Our Customer
Support staff has continued adding to their knowledge while at the
same time retaining the ability to support everything we've ever seen.
New CS personnel encounter an ever-increasing learning curve when they
come on board. It's a daunting challenge that they meet admirably,
and our hats are off to them.
* Perhaps the most significant change we have seen in the 1990s is the
evolution of general Internet access from something only computer pro-
fessionals had (or wanted) to its position now as a maturing industry.
It was our goal that Internet access should be a common thing, that
everyone should see the benefit of and participate in electronic com-
munication - this was our goal even before the WWW - and we are proud
to have been on the front of this successful movement.
Some of you undoubtedly have questions about how the "Y2K bug" will affect
your Internet connection. You can find our thoughts on this by going to
our web page (www.mv.com") and looking in the Tools and Information for MV
Users" section.
The NHISPA
In a prior newsletter we announced the New Hampshire ISP Association
(the NHISPA), a non-profit group created for the common benefit of indepen-
dent ISPs in New Hampshire. (One sure sign that an industry is maturing is
the formation of industry associations.) The NHISPA had a kick-off confer-
ence in early October at the Waterville Valley Conference Center; there we
heard technical presentations, made worthwhile contacts with vendor
representatives, and in general got to know each other better and work
towards our mutual benefit.
The NHISPA continues to address items of interest in the legislative
and regulatory arenas. One such item is the NH Public Utilities Commission
inquiry into telephone system congestion, which has broadened into discus-
sions of the nature of future Bell Atlantic offerings that can continue to
to be used on a retail basis by ISPs. Another is inquiry into the
potential formation of an executive body that deals specifically in
telecommunications issues.
The NHISPA is also working on tangible member benefits including
direct peering between members. In this context, two organizations are
said to "peer" when they have a direct high-speed connection between them,
and can exchange Internet traffic directly without going through a higher-
level Internet backbone. We have great hopes for the peering project and
believe it can help improve the flow of data not only between NHISPA
members, but to other entities in New Hampshire and beyond.
MV Communications, Inc. (603) 629-0000