ON-LINE OLYMPUSNET NEWSLETTER November, 2000

• OlympusNet Fiber
• Broadband Access
• OlympusNet's Broadband Offerings
• OlympusNet Terms and Conditions

OlympusNet Fiber
In mid November OlympusNet turned up its fiber connection. We will be transferring our high-speed circuits to the fiber during the first week in December and expect minimal disruptions.

How does the switch to fiber affect OlympusNet?
The fiber connection allows us to buy faster circuits than we now have and allows us to consolidate our many high-speed circuits onto one circuit. We have ordered one of those faster circuits, a T3.

Will you notice an improvement in speed?
You will soon, but for a different reason than the switch to fiber. We are adding a 'caching' server. When you click on a web page, your request will go the caching server. If it already has the page, it will send it to you without having to fetch it from the 'Net. If it doesn't have it, it will fetch the page using our high-speed circuits, send it to you and keep it for the next person. The caching server delivers pages quickly and reduces the load on our high-speed circuits. The caching server is in place and is currently under test. We expect to put it in service in the first week of December.

You are not likely to see an improvement in speed when we turn up the T3. The purpose of that circuit is to provide the bandwidth needed for our wireless and DSL offerings. For companies and government agencies that have need for 'one hop' access to the Internet backbone we will be offering dedicated T1 service. Wireless, DSL and T1 services need the capacity of the larger T3 connection.

Where does NoaNet (www.noanet.net) fit into the fiber picture?
As we discussed in our August Newsletter (www.olympus.net/newsletters/newsletterAug00.html), NoaNet will connect the Clallam County and, hopefully, the Jefferson County PUDs to their low-cost network next year. Those lowered costs will be passed along to our customers. OlympusNet uses the same fiber equipment as NoaNet so that we will be able to quickly turn up NoaNet service. We look to NoaNet's fiber to extend our broadband services inexpensively to Clallam County.

Broadband Access
Back in the summer when we posted our last Newsletter, we expected to sell DSL services through Fairpoint to Port Angeles, Sequim and Port Townsend in January. Fairpoint has not yet installed DSL equipment on the Peninsula.

Dial-up, Cable, Wireless, Frame Relay or DSL?
How do you decide which of these services meets your needs?
Think of them as complementary to one-another with areas of overlap. Each serves distinct needs.

• Dial-up will be around for a long time since you can tap into it anywhere in the world for low-speed access. When you travel, your cable, fixed wireless, and/or DSL access remains attached to your house or business. Thus, many of us will need dial-up in addition to other Internet service. Dial-up works well for email, and for light-to-moderate web browsing. It travels over a secure phone line to your ISP.
• Cable is a good service for heavy web browsing and fast (but uneven) speeds. It is an asymmetrical service in which you receive faster than you send. It is set up much like a giant office network called a 'bridge' in which each person can share files with all his neighbors. Because cable can expose your files to the neighborhood and carries your data into every house in the neighborhood, industry regards cable service as best suited for residential rather than business use. One of the hot topics facing the FCC next year is whether to open cable access to ISPs. The pending AOL-Time/Warner merger will indicate which direction the FCC may take.
• Fixed Wireless, which differs from mobile or cell-phone wireless, has a bright future. The next generation of fixed wireless radios going into production in 2001 have breathtaking speeds, the promise of broad coverage in built-up areas, and need not be in direct line-of-sight with the base radio. Wireless will be OlympusNet’s primary means of distributing broadband data.
• Frame Relay (and dedicated 'T1' access) are premier services with the highest reliability and are topped only by Fiber. Problems get instant attention both from the telephone company and your ISP. They are expensive and generally used only by businesses. Speeds range from 56k to T3.
• DSL, like wireless, comes in many forms and is evolving rapidly. DSL stands for 'Digital Subscriber Loop' and is fast Internet that travels over phone lines. Its major limitation is distance from the phone company's central office; fortunately that distance is constantly expanding. This spring we'll see DSL reach speeds of 25Mb over very short distances (less than one half mile from the local central office). Slower speeds will reach about five miles. One variant of DSL is 'symmetric' and is called SDSL. It's equally fast in both downloading and uploading and thus is suitable for carrying voice and interactive services. Because DSL is carried over dedicated phone lines it doesn't suffer the security concerns of cable. But a DSL line is still just a phone line and will not get the telephone company’s immediate attention if there are problems with it the way a Frame Relay or ‘T’ circuit will.

OlympusNet's Broadband Offerings

WIRELESS (Business and Residential Class Services)
As mentioned above, Wireless will be OlympusNet's primary means of distributing broadband data. The fixed wireless technology emerging in 2001 will offer outstanding performance. Rather than waiting for the next generation equipment, our customers will begin the year using off-the-shelf wireless radios. The monthly cost will be less than cable for 'light' residential use and the price will increase proportionally to the speed and volume of data consumed all the way to 1154k (T1) speeds and GB of downloaded data. . We will serve built-up areas and clusters of homes and industrial sites with wireless. We'll do that by supplying those wireless networks with a combination of DSL, T1, and wireless links. For a picture of a typical residential small wireless antennas used please see: www.olympus.net/wireless. OlympusNet has access to its first wireless sending site and we anticipate opening wireless to selected areas of Port Townsend and Jefferson County in February. Once NoaNet's fiber connects Port Townsend with Sequim and Port Angeles, OlympusNet will be able to offer wireless in Clallam County.

DSL (Business Class Services)
As mentioned above, we are disappointed that neither Qwest nor Fairpoint is currently wholesaling DSL for the local ISPs to sell in the North Olympic Peninsula. Last summer, Fairpoint thought it would have DSL equipment in the Port Angeles, Sequim and Port Townsend Qwest central offices by December. We had planned to offer DSL using their facilities. While we do have the option of using New Edge Networks' DSL equipment, the profit margins are too thin to make reselling their DSL worthwhile. (New Edge just laid off 135 employees so it appears that other ISPs shared our sentiments). We will offer Single-Tenant and Multi-Tenant DSL to the Port Townsend area. We will provide DSL service to buildings with Multi-Tenants anywhere on the Northern Oympic Peninsula with access to Frame Relay. When Qwest wholesales DSL services to us as it does to ISPs in metropolitan areas, we will offer the service to single tenants.

Qwest charges us $345 plus tax to install a DSL phone line and $45 plus tax per month. When those charges are added to the expense of our ensuring constant fast speed, plus general overhead costs, the price is driven beyond the desire of most of our residential customers. However, business customers who choose our DSL will enjoy our tight security, speeds that don't slow down during Internet 'rush hour', statistics on data consumption and data rates, and free dial-up as well as our outstanding OlympusNet support.
Here is the run-down of our DSL offerings:

• Multi-Tenant DSL Installation (Business Class Service)
  
  • Tenants may use their phone line simultaneously for voice or fax and DSL and will get four mailboxes and a free 15 hour per month dial-up account. A tenant no longer needs a separate line for voice and Internet.
  • The cost per tenant per month is $75 with a $75 start up fee. OlympusNet provides the router, pays for the DSL phone line installation and monthly Qwest charges.
  • Speeds start at 256k (five times the speed of a dial up modem) and go as high as 1554k (T1).
  Multi-Tenant accounts are for buildings with three or more tenants who want our service. The phone lines must all leave the building at a single point. Typically, each tenant will have a local area network. We can serve DSL to Multi-Tenant buildings anywhere in the North Olympic Peninsula where Frame Relay is available.
  • OlympusNet will maintain approved routers and firewalls for $50 per change.
• Single-Tenant DSL Installation (Business Class Service)
  
  • As in the Multi-Tenant situation, the Single-Tenant installation gets four mailboxes and a free 15 hour per month dial-up account.
  • The Single-Tenant needs to keep a separate phone line for voice.
  • OlympusNet pays for the recurring monthly cost of the DSL phone line ($45).
  • The setup charge of $396 covers the cost of the phone line installation ($345 + taxes).
  • The customer must purchase a router that costs from $230 to $600 depending on how sophisticated a network is needed.
  • OlympusNet will maintain approved routers and firewalls for $50 per change.
  • The cost of Single-Tenant DSL is $120 per month.
  • Speeds start at 256k

We are launching our first Multi- and Single-Tenant sites in December. We plan on offering DSL to those close to the phone company's central office in Port Townsend first, then expanding out to DSL's three-mile radius. For those who are interested in having DSL, please subscribe to the olympus-announce mailing list (www.olympus.net/mailinglist/mailinglists.html); we'll notify the list when we have firm dates.

OlympusNet Terms and Conditions
Use of OlympusNet implies that you agree to our Terms and Conditions which may be found at www.olympus.net/terms. We periodically update the Terms and Conditions and encourage you to review them.

Regards to all
Ned and Kate Schumann and the staff of OlympusNet
support@olympus.net