Well, it has been slightly more than one year since I started to work for MTN. It is almost unbelievable that this much time has passed. Looking back, we really have accomplished a great many things in that time. We have done a live Real-Audio broadcast onto the Internet, almost doubled our modem capacity, added a third server and done some major upgrades to our two existing servers, Freedom and Liberty.

I must say that the most exciting thing about working here at MTN is dealing with our clients. There are so many great nonprofit organizations we deal with and I am dedicated to helping them make themselves better known to this community and the world. This is really exciting for me; in fact, it is why I wanted to work here in the first place.

It has been a fulfilling year but there is much more to be done and we are constantly working on improving our services to you. We just upgraded our web server, Liberty, to a Dual Pentium 233 MHZ /MMX / 128 Megabytes Ram. It should serve our needs for quite some time to come. Next on our list, we will be upgrading Freedom, our primary server, to what we hope will be a Dual Pentium II with 233 MHz processors and at least 128 Megabytes of Memory to start with. We also plan on incorporating redundancy into our systems by adding a new server, Independence. It should act as a secondary name server and authentication server. If we do have problems with a server, Independence should keep most everyone up and running with minimal inconvenience. We, more than anyone, understand the frustration of not being able to get online because of a server problem.

Our most common problem has been modem disconnection. While many of these occurences are random due to line interference or flow control difficulties, some have been specifically disconnected as a result of our no-line camping policy that is that a modem which is connected and idle for 15 minutes is automatically disconnected. Users should not tie up our lines by setting their computer to check their mail every 5 or so minutes in order to keep their modem connection alive. We operate as a community service and ask our members to be considerate of their fellow MTN Internet Access users.

Effective January 1, 1998, we will be issuing a revised pricing schedule. Some of our prices will go up slightly. However we are raising the limit of allotted web space from 2 MB per user to 4 MB per user. We would like to encourage more and more publishing on the WWW. If you are interested in getting a web site up and running, we do offer classes. Please call for our schedule of web classes or consult MTN web site.

Finally, a few people have asked why it is that we only bill for internet services on an annual basis. In our efforts to serve nonprofit and civic organizations, we are trying to keep our administrative costs down as low as possible to pass the savings on to our users. If we were to do billing on a monthly basis, we would need another full-time staff member. This would raise our operating costs considerably. Instead, we would rather pass the savings on to you, our users, and focus our funds on the technical areas to enhance services.

There is a whole world out there waiting to be discovered via the Internet. We want to make this as easy and convenient as possible for our users so we are always actively pursuing the means to make this so. We will keep you posted on our activities. Don't forget to check our site at http://www.mtn.org.