Category: Changes

We’re officially discontinuing WiMAX broadband services in 2015.

This does not affect any customers on standard broadband or microwave services; those on WiMAX are explicitly noted as such in the account control center and on their invoices. The WiMAX customers were always a special case for locations where we couldn’t reach with our standard service. Affected customers will be contacted directly as we work through the list to determine if they can be converted to standard service since coverage has increased since the WiMAX customers were originally installed.

Since we are completely discontinuing WiMAX services we’ve also taken steps to remove it from our website and from the internet access service level agreement. We will not be grandfathering or retaining any WiMAX-only accounts.

We’ve revamped the Secondary DNS section in the account control center and also added TSIG support for authenticating zone transfers.

According to our changelog this is the first time since 2008 that we’ve made a change to the Secondary DNS backend (how’s that for code stability), so while we’ve tested the TSIG changes to the best of our ability hopefully it doesn’t introduce some weird bug after all this time that breaks our streak.

We’ve made a couple modifications to our office phone system that we hope are improvements based on our experiences.

• The “support” and “sales” options in the voice prompt menu are now using Asterisk call queues. It will keep you in queue for 5 minutes and then prompt to keep waiting or leave a message. It’s still relatively rare that we see multiple simultaneous calls, but the intent of switching to a call queue is to have callers to wait a bit for one of us to answer instead of being dropped directly to voicemail.
• Time based routing. Our business office for non-critical operations is Pacific time zone daytime business hours. We don’t have someone here answering sales calls 24-hours a day and likely never will. General tech support also isn’t 24-hours since our customer base is pretty self sufficient and doesn’t call for help often, so we can’t justify 24-hour phone staffing at this time. (Although that could change in the future.) So to that end we’ve added time checks to play an “after hours” message and a reminder about the hotline for true emergencies.
• The hotline is unchanged and continues to work as before, although we have updated the intro message. Our hotline system has been extremely successful in practice.

If any issues come up we’ll adjust and reevaluate as needed.

We’ve upgraded our Roundcube webmail option to its latest stable version: 1.0.1. All basic functionality has been verified, but if you encounter any issues please reload or clear your browser cache before reporting them to us.