Infospeed Trial

MV Communications is looking for about 15-20 people to help us with an immediate trial of residential DSL using Bell Atlantic's Infospeed DSL fabric. (We'll also be using another carrier for business DSL, but that info will be for another time.) If you are interested in participating in this trial and becoming a DSL customer, please read on. If you qualify, let me know as soon as possible per the instructions at the end.

You will need to be located fairly near the CO (telephone company Central Office) in one of these cities:

• Concord
  
• Derry
  
• Dover
  
• Exeter
  
• Laconia
  
• Manchester
  
• Merrimack
  
• Milford
  
• Nashua
  
• South Nashua
  
• Newmarket
  
• Pelham
  
• Portsmouth
  
• Rochester
  
• Salem
  
• Wolfeboro

[ Note- we've gotten quite a bit of response from the Nashua/Manchester region, at this point we'd like to fill in a little more from the other areas on the list. But don't let that stop you from replying...]

For this service, you must be served directly by the CO, and not via an intermediate facility such as a SLC cabinet such as those that serve remote areas or industrial parks. You must also be within about 15,000 wire feet of the CO. (Note: you can get a good idea of where your CO is by going to www.mapquest.com, clicking on the online maps link, then scrolling down to where you can enter just an areacode and exchange. Enter the areacode and the exchange and you'll get a map with the CO location indicated.)

This will be residential ADSL service carried over your existing Bell Atlantic residential phone line.

The line speed would be 640Kbps toward you, 128Kbps towards us.

You will still be able to use your phone line as well as the DSL service (at the same time).

You would need to buy a DSL modem (that we will supply) for about $320.

Installation and the trial period (a month) would be free.

We'd give you a discount for at least a year on future service if you continue it past the trial. Specifically we'd charge $40/month for the service including the DSL line. (The expected full price will be around $50/month.) This trial is specificially for the 640Kbps/128Kbps data rate, but other rates will be available for the long term. Other rates will include 1.6Mbps/128Kbps, 7.1Mbps/640Kbps, and (in the fairly near future) 128Kbps/128Kbps, 256Kbps/256Kbps, and 384Kbps/384Kbps.

Some elaboration and comments:

I realize that the price of the DSL modem might be a hurdle. But we are working with Bell Atlantic in deploying their Infospeed DSL in New Hampshire, and BA has some specific parameters including requiring a fairly large number of test cases and mandating the particular kind of modem for this roll-out.

In the interests of full disclosure: when Bell Atlantic's ISP division begins offering Infospeed DSL in NH, they probably will have a promotion that will buy you the DSL modem (albeit a different brand of modem). Also, as I mentioned, after the trial period we will likely have lower-cost modems available as well.

yes and no. There will still be aspects of "sharing" but at a different level. You'll still be sharing the bandwidth that comes in at the ISP, and it'll be up to the ISP to maintain adequate bandwidth to the net. (also true with your cable company.) You'll also be sharing some amount of bandwidth infrastructure at the Bell Atlantic level and we both have to rely on them to provide it.

On the other hand, you do get your choice of ISP. If you decide we're not meeting your expectations you can fairly easily switch to another ISP that also uses the underlying Bell Atlantic Infospeed DSL service.

Caveats:

• We will expect DSL customers to abide by our policies and terms of service as expressed on our web page and as may be modified from time to time.

• As with cable service, we expect residential DSL customers to have high-speed access to the Internet supporting interactive use. In other words, it's not expected that you'll make excessive bandwidth demands constantly- this would be unfair to other users. However, rather than setting any hard and fast rules on what is excessive, I expect we will monitor usage requirements to find out what amount of bandwidth residential users want, and let the pricing and policy follow accordingly.