TurboNet Newsletter 10/15/05
Fiber Project Update
Our equipment is in its bunker in Pullman, ready to connect our central office in Moscow, via fiber optic cable, to our new backbone. This will be done by the end of October. We will have a brief period of being dual homed while we test EVERYTHING concerning the new backbone. Then switchover will be in November. You should not notice any difference in your service, because although we could see we would need more bandwidth at our old backbone, we had not reached that limit.
We’ve nearly finished changing the IP addresses of all of the thousands of ADSL customers and web sites. Whew! This was necessary because the old IP addresses belong to our current backbone provider, Sprint. The new addresses belong to us, so that particular project should never have to be done again.
Some time this winter we should have a fiber optic connection to the Port of Whitman’s industrial park in Pullman. From there we will branch out to serve more and more people with inexpensive high-speed Internet service. The big push will probably wait until springtime, as it’s somewhere between miserable and dangerous to install equipment in the winter.
Web EmailWhen we initially installed the web interface to our email server, available at http://mail.turbonet.com, we pictured it as being used occasionally by people who needed to check their mail when they were away from their computer. It turns out there are additional uses, and some disadvantages to using it.
Web Email is not meant to be your only email program. It does not save sent messages automatically and it is not backed up. If you’re using Web Email as your regular email program, I encourage you to start using something else – Outlook Express or Thunderbird or Eudora, etc. Feel free to phone and one of us can walk you through the setup. If you need to read your email regularly from more than one computer, programs like Outlook Express can be set up to leave the mail on the server for ten days or so, then delete it so it doesn’t slow down your access.
One unexpected advantage of knowing how to use Web Email comes when your regular email program is giving you problems. On a slow dial-up line, with a virus checker slowing things up even more, it can be hard to retrieve a large email with any regular email program. If your cousin sends you ten photos, and you need to see them and then delete them so your regular email will function, then Web Email is a great tool. Just go to http://mail.turbonet.com, give the page your username (the first part of your email address) and password, and it will show you any email still on the server.