There were two network incidents today:

Ice took out an antenna system in Lake Alyson resulting in loss of service to residents there until late this morning.

At 6:45 a worker at the Everett Fiber Optic center inadvertently "tripped" on a cable that resulted in taking our network, as well as countless others offline. The outage lasted 30 minutes or less and the network is now stable.

Our apologies to those that were inconvenienced by either of these incidents. I was surfing eBay at the time and was quite put out over the whole thing ;)

Regards,

Aaron

Last week I climbed up the main tower to replace an under-powered antenna that serves our 5.8 Ghz (line of sight) Southern service area. Before the replacement we were unable to reach portions of our coverage map near the Three Lakes area, Mero Road and Hidden Creeks. We are now getting EXCELLENT signal to those areas and have begun marketing in the region. If you are in that area and have a view to the North, give us a call regarding service!

Yesterday we installed a major network improvement, a device that now monitors all of the equipment at the tower and will automatically reboot any of the tower devices (Access Points, Antennas, and Routers) that lock up or otherwise fail to respond. 90% of the past outages have been due to a lockup at the tower, and we have needed to drive up to the mountain to reboot the equipment. This will now happen automatically within 60 seconds of the outage, as well as record the incident to our monitoring system.

We are looking into the possibility of adding the devices to the major relay systems as well (Lake Alyson,

Ben has managed to dupe an unsuspecting young man into working long hours for very little return. They say misery loves company! We will be bringing the newest member of our team, Shaun, up to speed over the next few weeks, so watch for him out in the field. So far he has mastered the arts of getting lunch, fetching wrenches, holding umbrellas, driving us to the tower and putting up with bad jokes. Soon he will be ready for screwdriver training, and if all goes well, cordless drills! Shaun should be fairly easy to recognize, he is much more intelligent than Ben, though not quite as pretty (you can't have it all, I guess.)

All joking aside, I would like to welcome Shaun to the team. Having another technician will allow us to respond that much faster to customer needs, as well as manage more installs per day.

Regards,

Our apologies for the brief outage today. Service was interrupted for an hour and 45 minutes this afternoon due to an HVAC repairman from another company unplugging and moving our equipment so that he could more easily reach a fan in need of repair. We were able to respond quickly and get the system back online. Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that no amount of technology would have prevented, though an attack dog may have been helpful ;)

We are grateful that it didn't occur during standard business hours, hopefully it did not disrupt too many of you.

Thanks for you ongoing support,

Aaron

Service in Lake Roesiger is excellent on the North Lake! We have high speed coverage to the entire eastern shore and will bring the western shore online next week. Our innitial customers are reporting speeds of up to 7 meg, depending on location, so give a call if you are interested in service.

We brought Lake Boswirth online yesterday, and are getting full speeds throughought the southern, northern and eastern shores of the lake. We should have the western shore online by mid month.

One of the relays at Lake Alyson took damage from the storm last night, causing a brief interruption for those customers. We are on our way out with a replacement and will have it back online this evening.

Thanks for your patience,

Aaron

   Lake Alyson residents are coming online quickly, with 14 customers so far. Today we went door to door in the neighborhood handing out information packets and meeting everyone. We had a lot of excited people and a lot of support, thanks for choosing Thunderbird and welcome aboard.

Today we also finalized arrangements for the main service link into Lake Roesiger. We should have repeaters an ...

The Lake Alyson links are up and running and the coverage is amazing! We just picked up the signal 8 miles away near Frontier Airpark with an RSSI well above -70!

As soon as the customer equipment comes in we can start getting everyone hooked up :)

Regards,

Aaron