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newsletter://mv.com
July 2000
Our 10th year
We recently celebrated our 9th anniversary as a company, having incor-
porated on June 21, 1991, and having opened our office in Litchfield NH at
that time. This means that we are now in our tenth year as a commercial
ISP - but note that we have been providing connections since around 1985,
and have been doing so with the MV.COM Internet domain since 1987.
Introductory DSL specials
As we begin taking orders for DSL service, we will be holding an
introductory special. If you sign up with us for DSL service between now
and September 30, you'll receive a 10% discount off of our normal DSL list
rates for your first year of service. (If however, due to changes in our
pricing or in our cost, should this 10% discount result in a price that is
below the basic cost paid by us to our supplier to the underlying DSL line,
you will instead be charged that underlying cost.)
Referral Credits
Don't forget that you can get credits for referring new customers to us!
If you refer a new normal dialup customer to us, we'll credit your
account with $10.00 (or $25.00 for a new DSL customer). When the new cus-
tomer signs up with us, have them let us know that you referred them, and
be as specific about your account identity as you can. If possible, use
your full account number (six digits, a hyphen, two digits) or your account
name (the name that you log in with), or your email address at MV. After
we have received the initial deposit from the new customer, we'll credit
your account with the referral fee.
News server & satellite feed
We mentioned in the last newsletter that we'd be installing a satel-
lite dish for reception of Usenet News traffic; receiving via satellite
takes a lot of this traffic off of our Internet backbone connections. The
Cidera dish was installed in May and is up and running. As of this writing
we are receiving about 20% of our news via this feed.
If you participate in Usenet you may have noticed that our news server
has, over the last month or so, had a problem where you may not be able to
connect to it for brief periods. The news server is due for a horsepower
upgrade and as of this writing we are awaiting some new hardware that will
address this problem. By mid-July we expect this new hardware to be in
place. As a side-effect, we expect that with the new hardware the percen-
tage of articles received over the satellite feed will increase; our goal
is to take 70% or more of our incoming Usenet traffic from the satellite
feed.
home.mv.net
Customer Service at MV has recently completed a set of web pages
intended for customers at http://home.mv.net/. These pages do not replace
MV's existing pages at http://www.mv.com/, but instead will provide more
specific information for current MV customers. Included at home.mv.net you
will find:
o Announcements and news regarding MV developments
o Detailed setup instructions to configure your software for use with MV
o Useful informational websites as well as many local links
o Easy access to your account information including recent login records
MV Customer Service will be keeping the page up to date with recent
happenings and invites you to visit the page and send any suggestions along
to mv-admin@mv.com.
Footnotes
UUCP: In June the UUCP Mapping Project (http://www.uucp.org/)
announced that it was shutting down. Back in the old days, much email and
Usenet news was carried over UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) via dialup telephone
lines, traveling hop by hop from system to system. The UUCP Mapping Pro-
ject was formed to optimize and automate these hops by keeping track of
which systems connected to which other systems. This announcement is of
particular interest to us since we were an early participant in UUCP net-
working, and since the UUCP Mapping Project came up with the idea of
"domain parks" (analogous to "office parks"), which provided us with the
impetus to register our domain name MV.COM in 1987. (Trivia item: in the
history section of the uucp.org web site you will find a 1981 map of the
UUCP network; on this map is "sii" - a New Hampshire site run by two of the
founders of MV.)
NHISPA: The NH ISP Association (http://www.nhispa.org/) is scheduled
to hold its second annual conference on September 28, 2000 in Concord. The
conference will feature technical sessions and vendor areas for ISP members
and interested parties. Details will be made available on the NHISPA web
site. The NHISPA also continues to participate in PUC dockets regarding
network congestion and local dialing issues.
mv.com PO Box 4963, Manchester, NH 03108 (603) 629-0000