NOTE: If you are a BROADBAND WIRELESS OR
DSL CUSTOMER you NEED NOT DO ANYTHING as
far as configuration changes! The information below is surely of general
importance to all our customers, but the ONLY
customers who needed to make any of the recent changes were dial-up customers. In a nutshell, if your Internet access is
working, don’t change ANYTHING! IF, AFTER MAKING THE CHANGES YOU ARE
DISSATISFIED FOR ANY REASON, BY ALL MEANS CALL OUR OFFICE FOR HELP. THIS WAS, AFTER ALL, ABOUT UPGRADING.
To summarize;
ColusaNET Wireless and ColusaNET DSL
customers were spared the recent network changes that were required of our
dial-up users. For those of you who use
dial-up, I realize this was a rather painful transition for some of you. Due to various bugs in Windows and ESPECIALLY in
Outlook Express as we discovered, about 30% of you noticed that once you made
the changes you were unable to get connected.
Many more of you made the transition without incident and went on with
your business. If you experienced trouble
and are still having problems, please call for assistance. The changes were optional when we announced
them in March but became mandatory as of June 13 when we shut down our 458-3546
number that had been our dial-up number since the transition from 33.6 modems
to 56k some 6 years ago! Below is a
summary of the changes:
Some customers mistakenly changed their username to
their full email address in the USERNAME field in both Outlook
Express as well as in the dial-up settings. THIS WAS NOT REQUIRED. If
you mistakenly did this in your email software you probably noticed that your
email suddenly stopped working! The solution
is to simply change it back the way it was.
The only change that needed to be made to your email software was the smtp server setting. You can still see the instructions on our web
site (www.colusanet.com), top dead
center right under the ColusaNET logo at the top; the link called “Network
Changes”.
Additionally,
at the left of our page where it says
“Our Network”, there is a link called “Customer Set-Up Info”. That’s
where you can always find the most up to date setup information etc.. Whenever
you have questions about your settings, always check the Customer Set-Up
page before wasting a lot of time and getting frustrated. The answer is likely to be there. (You should keep a copy of it in your files.)
While our ColusaNET Wireless Broadband service is enjoying rapid growth,
dial-up is still the most widely used form of Internet access in the world, by
a long shot. In order to do a “ground
up” overhaul of our dial-up modem banks we had to completely abandon all
available local phone services and bring in new connections. I won’t go into the reasons why, but suffice
it to say that this is what necessitated the phone number change. For almost 10 years now, our main focus has been
on having the most up to date connectivity technology, and providing bandwidth figures
(connection speed) unmatched by anyone.
The proof is in the pudding; our main competition has been rumored to be
claiming that they are able to match “OUR” service offerings with their ADSL
service!!! I don’t think so, just do the
math. Our Wireless Broadband can take
the “Pepsi Challenge” any time. But a huge corporation changing direction to keep up with us? THAT ought to tell you something . . .
All the
“bandwidth bragging” isn’t based on opinion by the way, we have data to back it
up. If you don’t think you’re getting
the speed you should be getting, I’ll offer to prove to you that it’s not just
advertising fluff. I can demonstrate and
back up the claim. It’s not rocket
science although I understand if it resembles such. I routinely see our wireless customers hitting
multi-megabit speeds. Try doing that
with our competition’s dsl; it won’t happen. The “Holy Grail” is speed, and to be honest,
only the newest computers can even sustain multi-megabit speeds.
Making such
a sweeping network change is a monumental task to put it mildly; literally
thousands of computers were involved and that meant a lot of phone calls. Having said that, I want to personally thank
those of you who were patient during the transition, and I would like to personally
apologize to those of you who experienced difficulty making the changes. Besides providing superior speed, my goal has
always been to offer explanations, albeit seemingly in a foreign language, and
try to nudge the customer toward a better understanding of the technology. My only hope is that you walked away from
this exercise knowing a little bit more about how all this Internet stuff
works. (Rk)