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- Everything related to the internet:
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- Wireless Connection to your country home or business
- Connection to the World Wide Web
- E-Mail service and email user accounts
- Hosting for personal and commercial web accounts
- Domain name registration and management
- Site Development including commercial art design.
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- Our towers and transmitting systems are in place and operating.
We are expanding coverage each month.
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- All the actual connection electronics is designed by Lucent
Technologies, formerly the research division of the SWBell phone company. The
electronics are made by Agere and Avaya. Proprietary software is loaded on top
of the 802.11b standard firmware to add to the security, performance, and
manageability of the base line equipment. Newer equipment is made by
TRANZEO, a company out of Canada. The equipment at your location will
consist of a RF Modem/Router, an antenna, and misc. hardware including a Cat 5
cable to one computer. A full line of internal wiring including local wireless
systems is available as options.
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- No! - The system operates in the 2.4 and 5.2-5.8 gig range, just like the better cordless telephones. The system is within FCC allowable power limits.
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- A team of individuals with property ownership in this area for over 30 years who are tired of having poor Internet access service and like the idea of working from home. We have a registered engineer on the team and are currently seeking individuals for part time installation and network support. Our organization is "lite" to save you money - kind of like a co-op. We have a business affillation with Sugarloaf Networks which is funding and handling the administration of this neighborhood system as one of their projects. More About Us
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We bill you each month with an addressed return payment envelope.
Many customers set up automatic check writing services that mail us checks each
month. If you choose this method, then please have then get us the checks by
the 10th of the current month. Any checks will be made payable to HillcountryTx
Networks, a Hays county registered business.
We will be handling the
credit card payment processing by sending you an Email Invoice from which you
will be directed to a secure web site that collects and verifys your Credit
Card information. We also allow paypal payments - if you have a PayPal account
you send to rick@snider.org PayPal account. If not
click here. To
learn more about Pay
Pal click here
- This is a network for personal use. Our commitment to service is to
provide not 99.999% uptime but 99.00% uptime so that we don't have to charge
you for a team of people sitting around reading magazines and playing computer
games in order to provide you with critical business levels of uptime.
- This is a network for personal use, not CRITICAL business use. VPN
does work. We have a number of users operating VPN from their homes to their
company networks successfully. If you need VPN and use it sometimes to avoid a
drive back to the office, it works. We do not service or support VPN, other
than to communicate with your company network support people on the needed IP
address structure that we provide to you. Then they do their "magic" and it
works.
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- This network is based on community support. We typically swap use of
your property as a repeating location for free internet service to your home.
We can discuss what we look for in a repeater location and how we handle our
access to your property when required to service our equipment.
- We provide up to 4 email accounts for each of our subscriber for
free. Your account would be "yourname@hillcountrytx.net". We can do more
special email for a reasonable fee. Such as if you wanted to be
"John@JohnsBusiness.com"
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- We do offer professional web development
and web site hosting for reasonable costs, through our Maryland operation. We
will be glad to discuss further.
- This is a network for legal personal use. We don't allow any high
speed outbound web content, or streaming audio or video distribution.
We don't allow you to resale this connection or share with your neighbor. We do
appreciate any referrals that you make that result in our selling a connection
to your neighbor. Downloads are fast, uploads are slower, so if you want to "stream video" to the world we reserve the right to limit your upload speed and
suggest other ways of doing that. We do have web hosting sites that have
screaming fast upload capabilities and are better suited for delivering or
publishing content to the WWW. No malicious or disruptive activities are
tolerated. No multiple user outgoing unsolicited email (spam) is allowed. See
our Usage Policy for details and the
legal wording for all this.
- We can see packets moving across our network. Outsiders
cannot.
We have lots better things to do than snoop around the network
-- UNLESS -- we have network problems -- or get complaints from upstream
network managers. Then we watch for high volume traffic which might indicate a
virus on a PC. The October 2003 virus, Blaster, and several other virus around
that time cause PC's to send volumes of email or random packets across the
network. This brought down not only our connection to the internet, but the
entire Austin central router hub. We did a lot of watching of the network
packets and helped determine that the source of the problem was outside our
system. Check your PC to prevent this and you help keep the network running
smooth and fast.
We cannot connect to your PC or "see" beyond the
router that we place in your location to make the wireless connection back to
us.
We capture and try to forward to you any email which might be misspelled
by someone sending you email. Example if your email is "doris@hillcountrytx.net" and someone sends email to "dorix@hillcountrytx.net"
it falls into a dead email folder which we review and clean out monthly. We
have a very good customer which had the email account of
"prestigeporcelain@hillcountry.net". Try correctly spelling that three times.
So, he occasionally had mail sent to some mis-spelled version of that account
name. Generally we dump all the misspelled email unless we know you and
recognize the sender as non-spam.
- First - I give all customers a phone
number at which they can communicate with our staff. Customers can call any
time 24/7 and either get me or leave a
message and someone will get back with them. I don't live close to the
equipment, but have immediate access to troubleshoot the entire system from my
home or office. From my cell phone I can often help you fix or isolate the
problem even if I am driving.
Next we have several installer/support
techs living in the area near the towers. They work independent of us to do
interior wiring and PC and network service on hourly fee basis as you need. If
I can't resolve a problem, I will call them in to visit you or one of our
equipment locations. If the problem is with my equipment there is no charge to
you.
Just remember, if you call me at 2:00 in the morning -- be sure to
tell me if you don't want to be called back shortly thereafter.
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