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In our continuing effort to re-invest in our network infrastructure we replaced two of our core routers at our Seattle facility. Our existing routers were nearly 7 years old and had reached the end of their usefulness. New technologies and greater processing power were some of the benefits of this upgrade. As a result of this hardware upgrade we were able to upgrade one of our 100Mb Ethernet connections to 1000Mb fiber. A long overdue upgrade to our retail store in Friday Harbor has been completed! We have expanded our retail space by 40%, updated the color scheme, changed the front entrance and replaced the 12 year old carpet with beautiful wood floors. A dramatic transformation and a welcome change for both staff and customers! Our 7th WiFi hot spot access point is now operational. This Hotspot links to our Vanderyacht hotspot and provides improved coverage at the Airport terminal and surrounding areas. Rock Island customers can check their email without authentication, just connect to the wireless network and start up your email program! Web browsing can be done using Instant verification and access using real-time credit card authorization, or have WiFi Access added to your existing account for a small monthly fee. Rock Island has turned up the Eastsound Canopy Wireless transmitter and is now providing Highspeed Broadband over wireless to customers within 3 miles of our transmitter. This would include most businesses in Eastsound, either side of the "valley" and out towards Rosario. Interested individuals should fill out our online service request form and we will arrange to make a site vist. For more information on our Canopy Wireless system please visit our Wireless information pages. Our 6th WiFi hot spot access point is now operational. Covering the neighborhood around Vanderyacht Propane. Residents in the Greenway subdivision, airport and surrounding areas should be able to pick up our signal. Rock Island customers can check their email without authentication, just connect to the wireless network and start up your email program! Web browsing can be done using Instant verification and access using real-time credit card authorization, or have WiFi Access added to your existing account for a small monthly fee. Phase Two at"The Oaks" community is now complete, Phase One was completed in mid February which covers the upper half of the neighborhood. Phase two covers the lower half of the community. Rock Island customers can check their email without authentication, just connect to the wireless network and start up your email program! Web browsing can be done using Instant verification and access using real-time credit card authorization, or have WiFi Access added to your existing account for a small monthly fee. Our 5th WiFi hot spot access point is now operational. The latest Hot Spot is on our roof top tower across from the County Court house. This hot spot will provide service throughout the town area as far as Harrison Street, Caines, Blair a portion of Guard Street, any location that has line of sight to the roof of our building. Rock Island customers can check their email without authentication, just connect to the wireless network and start up your email program! Web browsing can be done using Instant verification and access using real-time credit card authorization, or have WiFi Access added to your existing account for a small monthly fee. Rock Island has completed the installation of a 60MB back-haul link between our Mt. Constitution repeater site and Eastsound. This new high capacity back-haul link ties our Eastsound Network Access Point (NAP) to our Friday Harbor Network Operations Center (NOC). This latest backbone link is part of our on-going wireless expansion project for San Juan County. Our 4th WiFi hot spot access point is now operational. Phase One at"The Oaks" community is now complete, Phase Two will be completed in mid February which should cover the lower half of the neighborhood, and improve coverage for the upper half. Rock Island customers can check their email without authentication, just connect to the wireless network and start up your email program! Web browsing can be done using Instant verification and access using real-time credit card authorization, or have WiFi Access added to your existing account for a small monthly fee. Our 3rd WiFi hot spot access point is now operational. Covering the neighborhood around Genest Street, across Surina Meadows towards Malcolm Street, and as far as the Pool Suites. Rock Island customers can check their email without authentication, just connect to the wireless network and start up your email program! Web browsing can be done using Instant verification and access using real-time credit card authorization, or have WiFi Access added to your existing account for a small monthly fee. Our 2nd WiFi hot spot access point is now operational. The main ferry holding lot and most of Lot B is covered by our signal. Even a portion of Brown (Friday) Island is covered. Rock Island customers can check their email without authentication, just connect to the wireless network and start up your email program! Web browsing can be done using Instant verification and access using real-time credit card authorization, or have WiFi Access added to your existing account for a small monthly fee. Rock Island has developed a rugged outdoor wireless hot spot and mesh networking product and the Orcas Ferry landing is our first public access point for WiFI access. Instant access is available via the hot spot captive portal for daily, weekly and monthly access. Instant verification and access using real-time credit card authorization, no waiting, no hassles. As a bonus, any Rock Island customer can check their email without authentication, just connect to the wireless network and start up your email program! Web browsing can be done using Instant verification and access using real-time credit card authorization, or have WiFi Access added to your existing account for a small monthly fee. This week we brought online a new POP3/IMAP server. This new server stores all of our customers email and hosts the Web Mail interface. It took almost 3 days to transfer all of the email from the old server to the new server. This transfer process took place in the background so for a few days the mail access was particularly slow. We are happy to see a dramatic improvement in Web Mail response time and typical maintenance processes are taking less than half the time as before. This week we brought online two new IN bound Mail servers. These new servers replaced older slower servers that were having trouble keeping up with the mail volume. Dear Valued Customers, We are pleased to announce that effective June 15th Rock Island will be transferring our 24 hour support to Frontline Call Center based on Orcas Island. Frontline and Rock Island have been working closely over the last 4 weeks training Frontline staff on how to support our customers. Rock Island developed a comprehensive technical support manual to assist Frontline personnel in resolving many of the common and not so common Internet issues our customers encounter. In addition to ongoing support documentation, Rock Island has been calling into Frontline with "support scenarios" to further refine the support process and give Frontline an opportunity to test their staff on resolving issues in a timely manner. Frontline has really stepped up to the plate and are doing a fantastic job learning how to competently diagnose and resolve technical issues. Leading the Frontline Support team is Kevin Roach, a former Rock Island Broadband field engineer. Kevin worked for Rock Island for the past year installing Broadband services and providing support to our customers. Having Kevin leading the Frontline group is a huge benefit for both Frontline, Rock Island and of course our customers. What do these changes mean to you? We anticipate the following benefits:
Rock Island has turned up the Mt Consitution Canopy Wireless transmitter and is now providing Highspeed Broadband over wireless to customers within 18 miles of the radio facility on Mt Consitution. This particular transmitter should provide access to customers throughout the San Juans, including Waldron, Stuart, Sinclair, Orcas, Shaw, Lopez and outer islands. If you can see the middle red lights on the lower 500' tower on Mt. Constitution chances are you can get Wireless Internet. Interested individuals should fill out our online service request form and we will arrange to make a site vist. For more information on our Canopy Wireless system please visit our Wireless information pages. Rock Island has completed the installation of a 300MB back-haul link to Orcas Island, this new high capacity link ties Rock Islands Friday Harbor network operations center to their new Canopy Wireless cluster on Mt Consitution. This 300MB backbone link is the latest in our network expansion and capacity upgrade project for 2006. Rock Island has turned up the Friday Harbor Canopy Wireless transmitter and is now providing Highspeed Broadband over wireless to customers on San Juan Island. This particular transmitter will provide access to customers throughout Friday Harbor, San Juan Valley, Hillview Terrace, Ridgedale Lane, Seaview lane, East facing Dallas, and Cady mountain and Madden Lane facing North East. These areas are confirmed to receive a signal, other areas will require a site survey. Interested individuals should fill out our online service request form and we will arrange to make a site vist. For more information on our Canopy Wireless system please visit our Wireless information pages. We are pleased to announce our new and improved Customer Control Panel. Instead of having to provide a username or email address and password for each different support tool we have consolidated these tools into one unified place. Customers can log into one interface and have access to all of our support tools from one convienent location. Customers can change passwords, enable or disable their vacation responder, manage spam filters, login to the web mail system or gain access to billing records all from one convienent location. Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is a Internet protocol for gaining access to messages that are stored on a server. Using IMAP, you can open your e-mail from any computer with an Internet connection. Once you set up your IMAP account, you can specify the folders you want to show and the ones you want to hide. A server-based account saves you time by downloading only your message headers so that you can choose which messages you want to later download and view in their entirety. When you are working offline, you can read and respond to e-mail messages just as you would when working online. The next time you work online, your server-based e-mail account will synchronize the e-mail on your computer with the server. During the synchronization process, the actions you performed in your account are carried out on the server. For instructions on how to configure the IMAP protocol for your email program, please refer to the following Knowledge Base article. Based on feedback from our customers we have developed the following enhancements to our Spam Filtering system. To help customers to better utilize the filtering system we created the following Online Help System to explain each filter option and how it works. While no spam filter system is 100% perfect, using the filter system and the options provided will significantly reduce the volume of SPAM that reaches your INBOX.
You can now select the number of days quarantined messages will be held before we remove them from your spam folder. The default is 14 days, you can select 0-7 or 14 days. If you select 0 days all messages in the SPAM folder will be removed at the end of the day. If you receive a message that contains a virus you have the option of being notified that our system blocked it. You will receive one notification per message that was blocked. Grey Listing works by keeping track of three pieces of information (referred to as a 'triplet'), which consist of the connecting mail servers IP, the senders email address, and the recipients email address. When a connection to our server is made it checks to see if the "triplet" is in the database, if not the message is rejected with a "try again later" message and the triplet is added to the database, when the sending server connects again later the message is then accepted. Any future mail with that triplet will not be grey listed and will be processed as normal without any delay. The Grey Listing system works because most spam is never retried and as a result can drastically cut down on the amount of spam received. It does have the drawback that mail is initially delayed, standards compliant servers will typically retry in 15 - 30 minutes, but some may never try again. If your email is time sensitive, or critical, you should not use grey listing due to the initial delay and possibility of missing a message. Rock Island has enabled SSL encryption on our POP3, SMTP and IMAP servers. The benefit to our customers is that when you send or receive email your username and password are protected using SSL encryption technology. By default, email programs send your username, password and message content in "clear text" meaning that it is possible for a hacker to intercept that information and gain access to your account information or message contents. The chance of that happening is fairly remote, however we feel it is always benefitial to offer extra security to our customers any time we are able to. For instructions on how to enable SSL encryption in your email program, please refer to the following Knowledge Base Article. For slightly more than the cost of monthly Dial-Up service you can now have high speed DSL service! Our newest DSL service offer provides up to 256K download and 128K upload speeds. Get the convenience and power of our entry level DSL service and the benefit of extra email accounts as part of the package. If you have a 2nd line for your Internet service you can remove that and actually save money each month with our entry level DSL service. For more details please contact our DSL sales dept at 378-5884 or check out our DSL services page. Rock Island is a "Certified Retail Service Provider" for Opalco's fiber optic system called "Island Network", which services Friday Harbor and Eastsound. Our newest service utilizing the IN Fiber network is called "MetroNet Fiber" and is delivered by fiber optic to your home or business. Customers get a standard Ethernet port they can plug into their network and receive high speed Internet access and services via Rock Islands all fiber network backbone. Rock Island has the highest capacity network in the San Juan islands, with dual OC3 fiber connections to CenturyTel and high capacity DS3 circuits to the Internet from our Seattle colocation facility in the Westin Building. For more information about MetroNet services, contact admin@rockisland.com. Rock Island now provides all dial-up customers FREE TurboNet dial-up accelerator service. Rock Island customers can download the free TurboNet software for MAC or Windows from our Customer Support section. Existing TurboNet customers will need to un-install their current software and re-install our new and improved dial-up accelerator software. You asked for it and we listened! Customers can now pay their invoices or setup automatic payments using their credit card. To setup recurring credit card payments, or to manually pay invoices check out our detailed instructions. 
We have recently completed the upgrade of our standby power system to a new 65KVA diesel
generator.
This new power plant replaced our smaller 20KVA generator that only supplied power to our data center and downstairs retail store. Our new 65KVA generator supplies power to all of our offices and has an extended run time of 7 days. We have eliminated the setup fees for all Dial-Up, WebTV and Email accounts. Our Web Hosting and Domain registration rates have dropped significantly and we have beefed up our Hosting Plans with more email accounts, increased storage space and features. Get High Speed DSL for as low as $14.95* a month! (3 month introductory offer) We have significantly reduced our DSL service rates and cranked up the bandwidth too! Check out our new prices! Rock Island now provides Web Hosting customers the option of using our Windows based hosting platform. Customers that wish to use ASP or FrontPage Extensions now have the option to host on our Windows 2003 servers. There is no additional fee for Windows based hosting, customers currently on our Unix servers can be moved over to our Windows system by request. Rock Island has completed the installation of our OC3 fiber optic connection to CenturyTel. This new OC3 allows us to pack 3 DS3's worth of traffic over this new circuit, that works out to 155 MB per second! All of Rock Island's major backbone connections are now at DS3 capacity. Rock Island now provides Inbound email virus scanning free of charge. Rock Island was the first ISP in the San Juan's to provide real time virus scanning and notification for its customers. Rock Island has over 7500 Points of Presence throughout the USA, including Hawaii and Alaska! Enter the area code or two letter state code to find a local number to you! We have launched a new Online Knowledge Base system on our Support Page for customers to find answers to common questions. We update this KB system when we respond to new support incidents that have not been covered before. This is a constantly growing reference source so please check it out! As part of our continuing effort to provide top level customer service and support, we have launched a new Trouble Ticketing system. This new system integrates into our Internet Billing system and allows us to keep a historical record of customer support and service issues. Customers can view their trouble tickets from the Account Manager interface. With our Referral Rewards program existing customers can earn credit towards their Internet services. Online courses with MindLeaders e-Learning! 24hr access to the leading online learning system, with over 800 courses available and flexible packages there is something for everyone! 
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