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Monday, September 15, 2008

Internet Service Upgrade Update

It has been a month since we last updated you on the progress of our massive upgrade of our internet service and cable modem network, so it is time to fill you in on where we are. For the last two Sunday mornings, Wade England and his team of technicians have been at the EPB bright and early to carry out the movement and reassignment of hundreds of cable modems to our new CMTS hardware. The first Sunday produced about 1,500 homes and businesses moved to the new controller but several of those customers continued to have problems after the move such that our team spent much of the next week helping customers recover their connections. Obviously we learned from that experience and made adjustments in our procedures before the next group was moved yesterday.

Part of what we decided to do differently was to continue to move folks to the new controller, but to tell the cable modems to maintain the configuration that they used on the old controller until everyone is moved to the new controller and we can send a universal upgraded configuration file to all 5,000 cable modems on our network. This seems to be the best way to move folks with less chance of their system failing to communicate with the new controller. Of course, that means that, even if your cable modem has now been moved to the new controller, the speed of your connection is not yet fully upgraded due to the need to keep everyone the same until we can broadcast a new configuration to everyone. But you should already be noticing a considerable improvement! In fact, just during the evening of September 17 we were able to make a major improvement in the way our circuits to AT&T are utilized. Those of you in the gaming community, who have already had your modem moved to the new CMTS, should see much less lag.

At the same time, our new fiber interconnect with Bowling Green and the AT&T network located there is also nearing completion. When this is done we will be able to establish our own, locally owned, near-infinite bandwidth to the outside world via the new fiber circuit which is constructed atop TVA's transmission line that feeds Glasgow. Once we establish our presence in Bowling Green we will also be looking at ways to route our traffic to sources other than AT&T so we will no longer have all of our eggs in one basket, but that is still several months down the road.

With all of that said, our projected date for completing all of the presently planned upgrades such that you will see drastic improvements in the speed and performance of your cable modem internet connection is October 6. We are confident that you will find the wait well worth it as we are determined to provide the fastest internet access speeds available anywhere.

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