ON-LINE OLYMPUSNET NEWSLETTER July, 2000

• OlympusNet Fiber due October 5th
• Broadband and Los Angeles Freeways
• Truth in Broadband Advertising
• Mail Vulnerability
• OlympusNet Terms and Conditions

As mentioned in the March Newsletter, broadband Internet has been advancing at a rapid pace both on the Peninsula and in the technology. (Broadband means 'fast Internet'). Unfortunately there is so much to say this month that it would take a novella rather than a Newsletter. We'll send the next Newsletter in August.

We start with the announcement of the arrival of OlympusNet's fiber equipment which is the foundation for our DSL and later wireless broadband offerings. The next section is called 'Broadband and Los Angeles Freeways'. It describes how the discriminating Internet user can recognize congestion, similar to the congestion of our freeways and airways. Then we touch on broadband 'snake-oil' in the 'Truth in Broadband Advertising'.

We use the term 'bandwidth' liberally. It refers to the flow of data. A voice conversation occupies a higher bandwidth than an email conversation.

OlympusNet Fiber due October 5th
On October 5th, our fiber equipment arrives. That will enable us to replace our high speed Qwest (formerly US West) Internet wires with fiber*. Then we will be able to increase our bandwidth to the net to allow us to offer broadband, first over DSL, and later over wireless. We have not as yet set prices.

Broadband and Los Angeles Freeways
In order for you to become an informed consumer, you need to become acquainted with three new 'friends'. Their names are QoS, SLA, and Oversubscription. They govern the quality of your Internet service, guarantees, and the income of your Internet provider. They are worth getting to know if you use the net for more than recreation.

1. First, Oversubscription
   People lust for speed. With that speed they'll download gigabyte movies, megabyte recordings and listen to their favorite medley of talk programs and commentaries over the Internet. People will dream up ways to consume bandwidth that we cannot imagine. In other words, pave another freeway and we'll fill it. The freeway wanting to be filled the most is the one between your computer and your Internet provider - the 'last mile', one of the Internet's choke points.

   How does the Internet service provider (ISP) make money when more and more people use more and more bandwidth? The provider makes money by "oversubscribing" his bandwidth.

   Oversubscription = ISP bandwidth to its customers divided by ISP bandwidth to the net

   Oversubscription is possible because not everyone wants bandwidth at the same time. The higher the Oversubscription, the more money the Internet provider makes and the slower his network gets at rush hour - late afternoon and early evening.

   If the bandwidth available to customers is calculated as the total bandwidth of all available modem and Frame Relay circuits operating at the maximum speed, OlympusNet's current Oversubscription is 10 which places OlympusNet in the desirable "business" category of Internet services.

2. Second, QoS
   The term used for how an Internet provider manages his network's quality is called "Quality of Service" or QoS - your second friend. The vast majority of providers currently have no QoS. There is no management of the quality of their network beyond adding more bandwidth when the network gets excessively oversubscribed.

   Adding bandwidth gets expensive with broadband because the amounts of bandwidth needed are so high. The customer gets a "best effort" - a "we'll try, but no guarantees" on how fast downloads will be. The careful use of bandwidth management devices can improve the QoS and at the same time allow the Internet Provider to increase the Oversubscription ratio. For example, QoS can increase the bandwidth for voice, and decrease it for all other Internet traffic. OlympusNet realizes that the careful management of QoS is one of the keys to profitability in the broadband market and we will incorporate QoS technology in our broadband network.

3. Third, SLA
   Enter your third friend, the SLA or Service Level Agreement. Several months ago one of our upstream providers botched a router change in Seattle which shut down our connection to them. Our redundant circuit took the load so OlympusNet continued to operate normally. They kept telling us about our failed equipment for three days. When the dust settled, they admitted their error and compensated us. That's what an SLA does. If the provider does not live up to his measurable guarantees, his customer is compensated. The key word is 'measurable'. If you can't measure it, you can't guarantee it.

   One of OlympusNet's goals is to offer SLAs to our customers. These are measurable guarantees of performance. SLAs reflect the confidence that a provider has in his ability to deliver bandwidth in a measurable, reliable manner to his customers. To offer SLAs, we are increasing the redundancy of our equipment, moving all our servers behind firewalls (more than half are already) and completing the conversion to a single type of server operating system.

   (To measure network performance, Windows users have a dandy and inexpensive visual network performance tool at www.visualroute.com. Macintosh users have the Mac TCP Watcher from wallaby.seagull.net/mactcpwatcher.)

   Now that you've met QoS, SLA, and Oversubscription, you're a more savvy broadband consumer. Broadband is not about speed alone. It's about delivering high speed Internet access reliably and consistenty.

Truth in Broadband Advertising
Last week two broadband advertisements arrived. One of them reads "This product has a telco class CIR (Committed Information Rate) - which is a guarantee of Speed!".

Upon probing for details we discovered that the guarantee differed depending on whom we talked to. One support person said that the guarantee was based upon 80% of the speed that the customer paid for. Another call revealed that it was based on the speed indicated by the speed meter at www.2wire.com/services/bandwidth.asp. In other words, there is no "guarantee of Speed". If you or your provider can't accurately measure speed, there is no guarantee.

Another vendor's flier says "Furiously fast Internet access - 768 Kbps - via a broadband network where the number of users won't slow you down!"

This contradicts the 'Oversubscription' concept that we discussed above. Oversubscription should be a concern to that provider because they are launching their broadband program in Jefferson County with a T1 (1544 Kbps) When they sign up their 200th customer their Oversubscription will be 100. High Oversubscriptions are indicators of a "residential" category of Internet service.

OlympusNet wants you to be an informed and discriminating consumer and we will periodically revisit these topics as well as others. Upcoming topics are privacy, security and performance.

Mail Vulnerability
Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express have flaws which were uncovered late in July. In Outlook, all that is necessary for an intruder to run his program on your computer is for you to receive his mail. The mail need not be previewed or read. Macintosh computers are less susceptible to the attacks we've been seeing lately on Windows computers. The Eudora mail program is not vulnerable to this family of attacks and is used by OlympusNet staff and many of our customers.

OlympusNet set up a filter which blocks the above attack. We cannot be assured that this filter will trap variants of this attack. Should someone send a legitimate email to you that our filter traps, it will send an explanation of why the mail was rejected to the sender. You may ask the sender to re-send the mail to your non-filtered address (yourname@allmail.olympus.net). You need make no changes to your email program. Mail addressed to our virtual domain customers (yourname@mycompanyname.com) is not filtered. Should you wish your virtual domain mail to pass through our mail filter or if you have questions about the filter, please let support@olympus.net know. We will post documentation for the filter in our FAQs.

OlympusNet Terms and Conditions
Use of OlympusNet implies that you agree to the Terms and Conditions specified at OlympusNet Terms and Conditions.

*OlympusNet will be the first small provider in Qwest's territory to use a Cisco fiber multiplexer which converts light to electricity. Most Internet providers lease the fiber multiplexer that Qwest provides. OlympusNet elected to buy the newer Cisco equipment. Since Cisco builds this custom made multiplexer to order, our broadband roll-out was delayed.

More to follow in August and for now,
Regards to all
Ned and Kate Schumann and the staff of OlympusNet
support@olympus.net