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newsletter://mv.com
January 2002
Domain fee transition completed
As we announced last summer, our old style of charging for domain
nameservice has been completely phased out as of January 1, 2002. The old
style was to charge a monthly amount for each domain nameservice we hosted,
with that amount only being assessed if your other service charges did not
cover that amount. In other words, there was a minimum charge that was
offset by other charges in your account. One reason we got rid of this was
due to the difficulty of explaining it; another was that for most people
who wanted nameservice for multiple domains, the price was often too high.
Our new nameservice charge assesses a much lower $1/month fee for each
domain name on our nameservers, with the exception that the first domain
name per client incurs no charge provided you are paying for other services
along with that domain name. This new style was applied to all new domain
nameservice started on or after September 1, 2001. For all older nameser-
vice accounts the old style charges would remain in effect through January
1, 2002, at which time the new charging method would begin.
In summary, the new style charges for domain nameservice are now in
effect for all domains.
Bandwidth changes
As you know we added a DS3 (T3) Internet connection to Genuity in
Boston in November. With this circuit in place we were able to anticipate
shifting all of our bandwidth over to the T3 connections, moving away from
the slower T1 backbone links. (Note that we would not do this with only a
single T3 connection; we firmly believe in having multiple connections so
that if any one of them goes down, the other(s) can take up the slack.)
In December we added another 3Mbps of bandwidth on our Genuity T3 in
preparation for turning off the remaining T1s. On January 20, we said
goodbye to the UUNET T1, and on February 2 we will be turning off our last
T1 backbone connection (this one to Cable and Wireless). At this point our
connections to the Internet backbone will be entirely T3-based.
What this means to you is:
* Much higher speed access (and lower latency) to the Internet backbone
at our facility;
* Greater elasticity in handling unusual peak demand periods;
* Much quicker turnaround time for us to add bandwidth if we need it;
* Better availability of your web pages to other users on the Internet.
Note that you can find out about our backbone connectivity by following the
"About MV" link on our web page (at www.mv.com).
Usenet News server
Our Usenet News server is due for a major storage and software upgrade
over the coming few weeks. We will be changing the way the server operates
(specifically in the way articles are stored) which means that when we do
this upgrade, we'll have to clean out the current articles and let the
server start filling up again. This prospect is one reason why we've held
off adding space for this long -- but the time has come to bite the bullet
and do it. On the other hand, we don't anticipate any newsgroup renumber-
ing, and we do expect to be able to offer many more groups, much longer
retention times, and higher performance of the server. There isn't a fixed
date for this yet but expect it to happen in late February.
Billing notes
You may notice that this month's billing is about a week late. We
apologize for this delay and hope to make up for it next time. Our
invoices are intended to come out near the beginning of each month, but
when we moved to monthly invoicing in the middle of last year we had a
delay in the process that put them fairly late into that month. We've been
trying to move them gradually ahead to where they are supposed to be, but
slipped up this month.
Please remember that you can avoid a $1 statement fee by allowing us
to send you your bills via email. You will find a way to elect this option
at the customer service web center http://home.mv.net/, or you can simply
contact us by sending email to mv-admin@mv.mv.com or calling 603-629-0000
(1-800-MVC-NETS if you are not local to Manchester). Also at home.mv.net
you can view your billing information and our newsletters online.
MV Communications Inc. PO Box 4963, Manchester, NH 03108 (603) 629-0000