Thanks Rob. Bob Z., here's some more (from Charles Brewers periodic letter to subscribers, emphasis added):
Subject: MindSpring Announcements, November 5, 1997
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 1997 17:41:24 -0500 (EST)
From: Charles Brewer <re.announcement@mindspring.net>
MindSpring Announcements, November 5, 1997
Dear MindSpringers,
It is time for my periodic update on developments at MindSpring. Today we have:
* Network Report
* Support Report - Call Center Snapshot
* Version 3.0 Progress Report
* Growth and CV&Bs
As always, please read what you are interested in, and feel free to skip any or all of the rest.
NETWORK REPORT
My last two letters have dealt in excruciating detail with capacity problems we have had in some cities outside of the southeast. For a quick refresher, you can review them at:
mindspring.com and
mindspring.com
This time, the news is good. Here is a list of our action items from my last letter (in quotes), along with an update on each one.
1. "We do not accept new customers in any city where we are experiencing serious capacity problems."
We still don't, but the number of cities on that list has now dropped from 24 to 14. For the current list, check:
mindspring.com./prod-svc/capacity.html
2. "We are moving a substantial number of our customers formerly served by PSI POPs with capacity problems to POPs owned and operated by GridNet."
We are. We now have about 8% of our customers on GridNet POPs, 16% on
PSINet POPs, and 76% on MindSpring POPs. We have many more cities which are scheduled to convert from PSINet to GridNet in the coming weeks. We continue to be pleased with GridNet's performance as a vendor to us.
3. "We are building our own POPs to cover New York City and nearly all of California."
We opened these POPs on schedule on October 1. Also we have added another new one in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Capacity problems in all of these areas should now be a thing of the past. We have had some other issues to deal with on these new POPs. In particular, early on the California POPs experienced some network slowness (high latency and packet loss, you engineers). This was due to some problems in the upstream network configuration which have now been corrected. The New York POP suffered from dropped connections early on. There were two reasons for this, some bad "trunks" amongst our new phone lines, and some incompatibility between some older Sportster modems and a feature in our equipment. We fixed the bad trunks, which is always an ongoing battle. We turned off the new feature, which is called, believe it or not, V.42 Selective Reject. We believe that our California, New York City, and Harrisburg customers are getting very good quality connectivity out of the new MindSpring POPs now.
You may recall the Inverse Technology report on connectivity performance and our rather dismal showing therein that I referred to in my last letter. The new Inverse report shows our overall call failure rate was 5.1% in the October test period. This is down from 11.5% in the July report. We now rank substantially ahead of the industry average on this measure! Our MindSpring POP additions and moves to GridNet POPs are largely responsible for the improvement.
If you have any questions about issues related to our new POPs or POP moves to Gridnet, please check out this link:
help.mindspring.com
Bob |
