Whatwire July 2008 Newsletter

Welcome to our new monthly way to communicate with our customers about current happenings, future developments and works in progress.

Our goal is to make these newsletters as informative as possible to explain things that our customers may have noticed or will notice as our company evolves into one of the leading Wired and Wireless Internet Service Providers of Northern Colorado.

We will try to keep the same format month to month to cover the different branches of our company. If there are any suggestions please feel free to let us know by emailing our support department by clicking here.

Holiday Hours

Fri July 4th - Closed
Sat July 5th - Closed

Prior Month News

June was a month that was spent in it's entirety recovering from the May 22nd Tornado. We were able to finally finish the erection of the permanent Windsor Tower as well as move all equipment to it, and realign all our customers as needed for the changes in height.

We want to thank those that have been so patient with us through this process.

Current Month News

Whatwire is ready to start letting our tech saavy customers start testing our acceleration servers which ultimately will be implemented transparently across our entire network (August 1, 2008). The servers will be made available for customer use starting Monday July 7th, 2008.

Over the last few weeks we have tested the new service internally and have worked out all of the bugs we have come across.

To use the servers after the 7th you will need to manually configure your web browser to use proxy services.
The proxy server information is:

http://turbo.what-wire.com and the port is 3333 (Make sure you disable proxy for local addresses)

The testing phase is not for the faint of heart, Whatwire will not offer any support for setting up the proxy server in your web browser or problems that you may come across, but will activate the email address bugreport@what-wire.com for any problems to be reported to us so that we can fix them. We feel this approach is the best option because you can easily disable the proxy server in your browser to move around the specific problem, and reactivate as needed to continue testing.

For all our customers who wish to participate and give feedback, report bugs and push the system, we will enter you into a drawing for $100.00 cold hard cash.

Our internal testing has been very exciting, the speed increases during web browsing are very noticeable and the problems found and fixed so far have been very minimal.

We will be opening our new support site on Monday July 14th. The support site will be a complete revamp of the existing one, offering a more functional set of tools and more interactive offerings for communicating with our support department as well as each other.

You will be able to visit the new site by clicking on the "Support" button from our main page.

During the month of July we will be very busy. We will be converting each of our tower sites for warm weather operations as well as cleaning each one for it's annual maintenance. During this process we do not expect any downtimes for our customers.

At each site we will also be updating our inventory as well as identifying any equipment that may need to be replaced or upgraded.

We have received confirmation from Level 3 that they have received all the equipment needed to finish our network bandwidth upgrade. This order was placed April 26th, and we have been very patiently waiting for the much needed additional bandwidth on our network.

As many of you know during peak times, from 8:00pm to 10:00pm we are pushing almost our entire capacity. We are adding an additional 45MB of dedicated Internet access to our network and this should be done sometime in the month of July.

As we know more about this we will post it in the news on our main page.

Tech Tip

Our support department has noticed over the years and more significantly in the second quarter of this year that there needs to be a little more definition on what comprises most of our customers networks.

Whatwire provides fast Internet access to our customers homes and businesses via a proprietary wireless technology utilizing Motorola hardware and as a courtesy sells routers occasionally as part of the installation of our service to ease our customers experience during this process.

Whatwire has Towers all over Northern Colorado, all the way from Northern Commerce City to almost the Wyoming Border, and from the west side of I-25 to almost Fort Morgan. This is a rough coverage area.

Each customer connects to one of our towers, at which point Internet Access is converted from hard copper lines or fiber optics to an encrypted wireless link.

At our customers home or office the wireless link is then converted back to a hard copper line and handed off to our customers to use, whether that being plugged directly into a computer, a game console, a router or some specialized piece of equipment that can communicate over the Internet Protocol.

The Whatwire equipment at all of our customers locations consists of the following devices needed to convert the wireless signal back to a copper handoff to the customer.

The outside Subscriber Module will vary in it's appearance from customer to customer, as we have many different types, types of antennas that are attached to them based on distance, etc. some will look like satellite dishes, some will look like a tupperware bowl, and others will use external Yagi style antenna's. In the end it does not matter what is looks like, they all do the same thing, connect you to one of our towers.

I would like to focus on the power adapter for our equipment. This not only provides electricity to the equipment up on your roof, but also is the point at which the Whatwire network ends, and our customers home or business local area networks begin.

The RJ45 male jack that I have circled in red looks like a big telephone plug. During 90% of our support phone calls, we can login to the radio (Subscriber Module) on your roof, and we can run tests to the end of this plug.

It does not matter who your Internet service provider is, Whatwire, Comcast, Qwest, DirectTV or anyone else. The handoff to the customer for Internet access is always the same, an ethernet handoff. The equipment might look a little different, in the end there is always an RJ45 plug that is plugged into something. The only exception is for laptops with the new cellular based USB cards or credit card adapters you might see advertised on TV.

Whatwire Internet access does not require any special software to be used, as soon as this cable is plugged in to a computer. All that is needed is Microsoft Windows, Mac OS 9.x or above, or your favorite Unix based operating system with the IP protocol installed to work.

I think that it is important to outline this, because we have so many customers call us with problems on their networks that keep them from accessing the Internet, the first thing we always try and do is to bypass all equipment at their locations and get to the RJ45 plug circled above and get it plugged right into a computer directly. 9 out of 10 times this works and shows that Whatwire is providing the service that our customers are paying for.

More times than not, we have customers with wireless local area networks, and they associate those with the Whatwire service. These are two completely different networks as I think you can see from the above examples.

You will not see anything on your computer that tells you wireless signal strength, or anything else about the Whatwire network. You will however see on your computer, messages about wireless signal strength and various other indicators about your local area wireless network.

Almost 100% of the time when one of our customers has a problem accessing the Internet it is because of something in the router that had gone a stray. This is the case for any broadband Internet service provider.

In the past consumer based routers were built much better than they are today. They had more memory, they had faster processors and they had better operating systems than what you will find on the shelves today.

This downgrade has been a result of pricing wars between all the manufacturers, to sell them for less, you have to build them for less. All routers no matter who makes it are basically the same. I cannot say any one manufacturer is any better or worse than another. It boils down to price, specifications and support if there is a problem and you need assistance from their support department later.

If you do have a problem accessing the Internet, try the following, most of the time you will be back up in a few moments.

1.  Unplug your router from the electrical outlet for 10 seconds and plug it back in. Wait 1 minute for the router to boot back up, it is exactly like a computer, it has to load it's operating system and initialize all the hardware.

2.  Close your web browser (Explorer/Mozilla/Netscape) and reopen it to see if you have access.

3.  If you still do not have access, restart your computer.

If you still do not have access, try the following you might have lost the Whatwire link from your rooftop to our tower.

1.  Unplug the Motorola power supply from the electrical outlet for 10 seconds and plug it back in. Pay special attention to the greenish/yellowish light in the lower right hand corner, if it is not lit up and you know the outlet you are plugged into is good, the power supply needs to be replaced. You can bring it into our office for a replacement. The Motorola equipment has to not only load it's operating system and initialize the hardware, it also has to connect to the tower, wait 3 minutes after plugging this in for all those things to finish up.

2.  Follow the steps above.

3.  If you still do not have access, you might want to try and bypass the router and restart your computer, this will be the first thing our support department will want to do after we walk you through these steps.

If you follow this quick list of steps and everything still is not working, give us a call and we will be happy to troubleshoot even furthur.

Next month we will be talking about normal computer maintenance.

Behind the Scenes

Whatwire over the years has always used it's upstream service providers IP space (Internet Protocol). For those that do not know what an IP address is, I will give a brief overview.

If you think about an IP address there are two main types, Private and Public. And these are assigned either dynamically or statically.

Private static IP addresses are used throughout the Whatwire network for management of all of our Access Points, Backhauls and Subscriber Modules as well as a few other devices. And they are also used by all of our customers that have routers at their homes and businesses on their inside networks.

Private IP addresses can get out to any place on the Internet but the Internet cannot access them directly inbound, this is commonly how Firewalls are used to protect customers from the bad guys and gals that would want to do malicious things. Instead there is another Public IP address on the outside network that accepts all inbound connections and routes them to the various computers on temporary ports.

Public IP addresses can be thought of as something similar to your home address, the US Postal Service delivers snail mail based on zip code first, then physical address second for efficient (or at least usually efficient) delivery of your mail. Your address stays the same until you move, so we could say your home address is static, as in it never changes. A transient would be a little different, their address might be under the Broadway Bridge one day, could be a bench in Lincoln Park the next, or an abandoned Railcar the following day after. We could say in this example that their address is dynamic, it changes from time to time.

An IP Address is used to send your request to your favorite website, check your email or play the latest online games, and it is also used to receive the response, that displays the pictures and text for that website, downloads those email messages or updates the action on your screen.

In the past Whatwire utilized for most of it's customers dynamically assigned private IP space for them to gain access to the Internet. This was great from the provisioning and support side, if we needed more IP space for a specific tower we would assign bigger blocks and did not need approval or justification to do so. It would also add another level of Firewall services to our customers that did not have their own.

The downside for our customers was that they were being Firewalled/Natted twice or even 3 times, once at our routers, once at their router if they had a router, and then inside their computer via software. This was adding additional overhead to any request that was making their experience slower to respond. It also added several compatibility problems for all the services and applications on use in the Internet today.

The other downside to this was accountability and accurate troubleshooting as all customers per tower appeared to leave the Whatwire network as one IP address. There was one additional caveat that made us have to rethink our existing system, and that was the FCC's requirement for us to become CALEA Compliant.

You can read about CALEA by clicking here! All telephone companies and Internet service providers were given a deadline to become compliant.

In February of 2007 we realized that our IP address needs were going to considerably increase, so much so that our upstream service providers would not give us the space we needed to make the network conversions.

We started the application process to ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers), they are the organization responsible for North America for assigning IP space directly from the global repositories.

Our initial allocation for a /20 Network assignment which is 4096 IP addresses was approved in July of 2007, as you can see that process is very cumbersome and time consuming.

One year later, we are now almost out of space and have requested another /21 which is 2048 more IP addresses. During this request and seeing how much work it is, we have upgraded that request to another /20, which will double our IP address space.

What does this mean for our customers?

For most of our customers it means nothing, in September 2007 we started to aggressively renumber all of our customers with static IP addresses to the new space we were initially allocated. We have called customers, emailed them, sent out letters and even included reminders on our monthly bills. We have had less than a 40% response to the requests to make the changes, and now we are under the gun and need your help, August 1st, 2008 is when we will lose all the old IP address space from our upstream service providers.

Last September we posted this page http://myip.what-wire.com  please take a moment to visit it. If your IP address that displays in red starts with a 192.187.x.x number you will lose Internet access on July 31st at Midnight, please call our office as soon as possible so that we can migrate you beforehand. If your number in red starts with a 64.234.x.x you either already changed your static IP address, or you have a dynamic one on our network that has already been changed for you and there is nothing else that needs to be done.

Static vs. Dynamic

For most of our customers dynamic Public IP addresses are just fine. For those customers that have special needs such as VoiP (Telephone Service), VPN's (Virtual Private Networks), servers, Remote Desktop needs, need lower latency, have a router with multiple computers, etc. Static is the way to go. There will be a less likely chance that your service will be interrupted when your dynamic IP address expires and your router or computer has to request a new one, (Dynamic IP addresses expire every 24 hours on our network), our Static IP Blocks have a higher priority on our network, lower latency means better telephone call quality, better online gaming and faster downloads.

STATIC IP PROMOTION -- JULY 2008 

Whatwire will waive the $14.95 (one-time activation fee) and you will save an additional $0.95 per month when you add a static IP address to your router during the month of July.  The monthly static IP address fee will be $5.00, where normally it is $5.95/month.

Next month we will be talking about how we monitor our network.

July Special!

Celebrate your Independence by getting your own custom domain name. Have a home business? Don't like your current email address? Tired of switching email addresses every time you change Internet service providers? Want to promote your business or give the perception of being a larger company than you really may be?

During the month of July Whatwire is offering a price for life special for customers wishing to get their own domains. The price is $100.00* per year and includes domain name registration through our preferred registrar as well as hosting on our web servers.

What is a domain? www.what-wire.com is a domain or www.9news.com is a domain. Domains can house many things, a website, email accounts, remote storage just to name a few. Most people like the personalized email addresses associated with them.

If interested in this special please click here and send us an email with your contact information, name, address and a good telephone number. Also please include your top 5 choices for the domain you are interested in and label them in order as you would like to have them checked for availability.

For instance your last name might be "Ford" it would be very neat to have an email address of henry@ford.com, or henry@ford.org. As you might have guessed the domain Ford is already taken by our friendly automobile maker, with all of the Internet Extensions.

If your preferred domain is not available in .com it might be in .org, .us or another extension.

.com - Usually refers to a Commercial Website
.net - Represents the word network and is usually used by Technology companies and Internet companies
.org - Organizational Domain Name
.us - Americas Domain Extension
.biz - Usually used by Businesses
.info - Informational Sites
.name - Personal

These are a few of the extensions used and there are many more, some of which are reserved for government agencies and country specific organizations.

Hope everyone has a safe and Happy Holiday!

Whatwire Broadband Team!

* The $100.00 Annual Fee is paid in advance.