Dasia Transition

To all of our new Dasia DSL Customers,

Let me begin by saying welcome and thank you for placing your trust in Perigee.net. We hope that we can exceed your expectations for service and provide you with a high quality ISP for all of your current and future needs.

Background

January has been a challenging month for Perigee and our new Dasia DSL customers. We have tried hard to make the migration as painless as we possibly could, although some were more painful than others.  As usual in these types of situations, it was the unforeseen things that created most of the excitement. I promised several of you a quick recap of some of the issues we faced during this migration after we were done. Among other things, this letter should help with that.  Some of you mentioned you felt there was lacking or conflicting information given during the process and, hopefully, the information here will fill in some of the gaps.

Email

Before I proceed, I would like to comment on your email accounts with Dasia. Dasia has agreed to maintain your old email account whether it is at salisbury.net, statesville.net or i-america.net. Perigee has set up a forward so that any email that might be sent to your Perigee.net address (like this one) will get to you at that email address. I would encourage everyone to begin to migrate away from this old address.

I know many have had these email addresses for a long time, but you have a great opportunity to ask everyone in your address book to begin using your Perigee.net address and still continue to check your old account like you always have and get all of the email.  At such time as all your *real* email is addressed to your Perigee.net address, you can request that we remove the forwarding on your account, and set your computer up so you start checking your mail on a Perigee mail server.  This is a prudent step since we cannot be assured that Dasia will do this indefinitely and we would not like any surprises going forward.

As an alternative to using your Perigee address, you have two options. If you have a domain name, I would recommend that you start using it for your email. We would be glad to host your domain and make this happen for you, just give us a call or an email. The second option would be to use a public service like gmail.com, hotmail.com or yahoo.com. These work fairly well, but I would not recommend them for business dealings. In any event, if you do change your primary email address, please let us know so that we can continue to communicate with you via email.

If you have questions about making this change, please call us at 704-849-8355.

Transition

If you are not interested in the details of the transition, you do not need to read further.

My main goal in this letter is to thank you for your business and to make suggestions about email account transition. I did think that some of you might find it interesting to see the migration from our perspective.

You may be surprised to know that we first spoke to Dasia about their need to terminate DSL services on the 4th of December. We agreed to work with them to try and accomplish this by the end of the year and, to their credit, they were mainly concerned about trying to keep your service flowing while they worked to end their relationship with AT&T. They agreed to maintain all the email accounts until such time as we informed that it was no longer needed as a way to reduce the effort of the migration and minimize the disruption.

On December 9th, Dasia sent out an email to *all* of their subsribers saying that DSL service would be switched to Perigee and that they would not have to worry about doing anything. That email created some confusion since it went to customers who were not switching service and implied to the DSL customers that Perigee could just take the account over without any customer interaction.  A commendable notion, but hardly possible. As most of you know, our biggest hurdle was acessing the various DSL routers and configurations and then trying to re-configure the router for your Perigee account over the phone. I have to admit that the upside to that was that we got to know a lot of you better and, remarkably, even had a few laughs along the way!

Given that we had no way to communicate with the transition accounts except via telephone, we called *all* of the Dasia DSL customers to ask them to set up the new account with Perigee and discuss the technical aspects of the move. This worked for about half of the accounts, but we still had about a quarter of the accounts who we had talked with but were not ready for the transition on 12/31/09 because we couldn't access their router to re-configure it for Perigee. At that point, we had still not been able to contact the other quarter of the accounts although we had left messages regarding the impending termination of their Internet access.

On 12/31/09, we placed orders with AT&T to switch all remaining accounts who we had contacted, even if we could not access the router, because we knew we could get the DSL circuit up quicker by re-setting or replacing a router than if the circuit were shutdown. If shutdown happened, the customer would be down for at least a day or maybe two or three days.

We knew the week of the fourth would be challenging, but we had no idea of the magnitude. Monday morning, the fourth of January, our phone was lit up like the fourth of July! The unfortunate thing for us is that 75% of the call volume was Dasia customers who were not moving to Perigee, but calling because their mail was not working. Apparently, the message on Dasia's voicemail said to call Perigee if they were having any problems and given the fact that all of Dasia got an email in December about a new service with Perigee, I can't really blame them for that. It took several days for Dasia to get the mail flowing again which made for an interesting week while we dealt with that call volume intermingled with the DSL migration call volume plus our normal call volume!

We survived, but that weekend, Dasia's DSL service did shutdown, so the last quarter of Dasia's DSL customers (ones we had not spoken with yet) called over the next week or so and they were understandably frustrated because their DSL was down and they thought they were supposed to be switched over without doing anything!

On January 22nd, without realizing they might need to inform us, Dasia turned off the old Internet America DNS servers. (Note: 2/3/10 - We  learned later that in fact what had happened was that the legacy DNS services had been consolidated to one server and that the server's power supply expired causing the DNS outage.)  Some accounts had manually, hard coded these DNS servers into their configuration and so that was bad for them!  If you don't know already, DNS, which stands for Domain Name Service, takes a name like www.yahoo.com and converts it to a network address. This is important because I don't know anyone who knows what the IP Address is for "www.yahoo.com"! :) It took us a little time on Friday to figure out what was going on because the DSL was up and running, but the customer was stating that it was down.  Even after we figured out what was happening, there was not an easy or quick way to call everyone affected and walk them through fixing this, so we redirected all DNS requests for the old I-America DNS servers to our DNS server. It is not the best solution, but it was the only way to quickly fix the issue for everyone at one time.  Over time, we will try and wean those accounts off of the old DNS servers.

That same day we were also we seeing a different type of connection issue. Routers which had been connecting fine for days or weeks, just would not connect. For the next several days we worked with about 20-30 mystery DSL account problems. We made phone calls to AT&T support to no avail because everything checked out.  We switched out and re-configured routers but could not fix the problem permanently. The DSL would just appear to randomly stop working.

We noted quite anecdotally that the number of sessions on one busy switch that we connect to within AT&T's ATM network would never change. When we studied it, we noticed that when a circuit dropped off that switch it would be replaced by a different one and the dropped circuit would not connect. It was a crazy idea, but it seemed like some kind of artificial limit was being imposed.

On the 27th of January, we reached someone in AT&T customer service who could actually help.  To make a long story short, there was a maximum session limit set by AT&T which was causing the problem.  Apparently, it has something to do with tracking growth and classifying NSP business. As soon as AT&T removed the restriction, our router made a half dozen more connections from that switch and remarkably for the first time in a month, our phones started ringing normally again! 

Well, that's about it for the transition. It has been an interesting experience for Perigee.  Moving a large number of accounts so quickly is quite different than buying another ISP where you can just takeover the servers and domains and accounts. BTW - In those cases, you can actually make the transition virtually transparent. :)

If you read this far then congratulations! We appreciate your support and please feel free to call us at any time if you have any questions about your account with Perigee.

We look forward to serving you in the future!

Best Regards,

Jim Johnson