See an unfamiliar term? Check the newsletter glossary.
newsletter://mv.com
January 2000
Single number service
During the first part of this year we will be testing a new "single
number service" offering from Bell Atlantic. With this service, we will
have a single 1-500-xxx-xxxx telephone number that will act as a local call
to any Bell Atlantic customer in New Hampshire. We expect to start testing
in late January or early February and hope that you will help us in trying
it out. If it works well, we expect to be continuing it after the test
period. This service:
* Provides another state-wide dialin number to complement our Brooks
("BNH") numbers. By having an alternative, you may find that one of
these numbers works better for you than the other;
* Will allow us to have Bell Atlantic dialin service throughout the
state;
* Has the potential of addressing some of the issues with customers of
independent telephone companies who can call Bell Atlantic numbers but
who can not call our BNH numbers as a local call.
Further details will be posted on the news section of our web page
(see below) and on our mv.forum.general newsgroup as it becomes available.
New Bandwidth (C+W)
As you know, last November we added bandwidth to the Internet backbone
by getting a UUNet T1 connection. In the latter part of January we will be
turning up another T1, this one via Cable and Wireless. Cable and Wireless
took over the operation of the MCI Internet backbone, which was (and is)
one of the top carriers. This will add more bandwidth and even more diver-
sity and redundancy than we already offer.
POP closures
We've finally cancelled three of our analog dialup pools; these can-
cellations were scheduled for last fall but a certain amount of inertia
kept them open longer than we predicted. These were older analog pools
which have long since been superseded by other numbers (notably the BNH
numbers) offering V.90 and ISDN dialins as well as supporting normal modem
dialup. Analog modem pools cancelled in early January were:
* LNH (Litchfield), at 424-7428;
* DNH (Dover), at 740-9152;
* Litchfield telebit UUCP, at 429-1735 (this was a very small pool sup-
porting a particular modem brand that was popular in the early 1990s,
primarily for UUCP access).
Please see the access numbers on our web page for numbers that you can
call; with our BNH numbers (and with the single number service described
above) most callers have a choice of local numbers that can be used to
reach us.
Local peering
On the Internet, some information that you want might be geographi-
cally far away, and some other information might be local. Since there are
a number of ISPs in New Hampshire providing content, it often makes sense
for us to help distribute the flow of local data by establishing peering
relationships with other ISPs in the area whereby we exchange Internet
packets locally instead of sending them through more remote backbones.
Some local ISPs have indeed established an ad hoc peering group - these
include MV, Destek, JLC net, FCG networks, and others, and we expect more
to be included over the coming months.
Litchfield closing
We first opened for business in June 1991 in a barren office space in
Litchfield, NH. Even though we moved our main office to downtown Manches-
ter in June 1997, we kept some service in Litchfield. This service
included dialin modems and some high speed connections both for our own
backbone and for connections to customers. Since 1997 we have been moving
services away from the Litchfield hub, and by the end of January 2000 we
expect that no services will be remaining there.
Litchfield served us well: in 1991 it was a good choice for our first
location since it offered a local call across a wide range of communities
in the Nashua/Manchester corridor. Because of the telephone facilities
that we rapidly consumed there, NYNEX soon ran a fiber conduit directly
into one of our back rooms and installed some rather large equipment there
to providing an interface to the fiber. As our needs for technical and
human facilities became more advanced, the rural location became less
optimal, thus we moved and thus we are now terminating our presence in
Litchfield.
Frame relay move
The final service moved out of Litchfield is expected to be our Frame
Relay service. (Frame relay is a high-speed dedicated connection that is
used primarily by business customers.) Our Frame Relay service has been
operated out of our Litchfield location since we started offering it in
1995, but by the time you read this it should have been moved to our Man-
chester location.
NHISPA happenings
The NHISPA (New Hampshire ISP Association) was formed last year as a
non-profit association of ISPs in New Hampshire. NHISPA members are
actively interested in working together to continue to improve the state of
the Internet in New Hampshire. (MV Communications is a founding member.)
The NHISPA continues to grow, adding new members every quarter.
Over the past few months the NHISPA has continued to participate in
the Public Utilities Commission's docket on telephone system congestion.
Note that ISPs in New Hampshire have a real love/hate relationship with
Bell Atlantic, since BA provides many of the underlying services needed for
Internet operation and since BA has some interest in closing off some of
these services to competition, especially since they have begun taking
notice of the Internet. The NHISPA has made several filings in this docket
with the goal of opening up some of these services.
The NHISPA has also begun efforts to give us better access to other
parts of the state government; this is the sort of thing that a trade asso-
ciation can accomplish better than its individual members. We also expect
that the NHISPA will help to communicate to Internet users the things that
are going on at the state level that relate to the Internet. Another
NHISPA role may be to help foster the kind of local peering relationships
mentioned earlier.
MV web page
Just a reminder to use our web page (www.mv.com) as a resource. There
you can find:
* Information about things we offer that you might not know about, such
as web pages that every dialup account holder can have, tools to help
you run your web page, other kinds of services we offer, etc.;
* Reports about outages (including scheduled outages and reports of past
outages);
* News about happenings at MV;
* Usage policies;
* ClariNet news - a real world newspaper on our web server;
and so forth. Our web page will soon be undergoing some slight changes to
make it easier for you to jump directly to many specific interest areas.
mv.com PO Box 4963, Manchester, NH 03108 (603) 629-0000