Internet Access at a price you can afford!


Migrating from owned equipment

 If you are currently operating your own modem bank, you are probably facing one of the following two problems:
  • Inability to expand into surrounding areas without massive capital expenditure.
  • A cost structure that makes you non-competitve in your area.


    • Going virtual may well solve these problems for you. With Novatrope's Virtual ISP service, you will have access numbers available throughout the US and Canada, over 10,000 POP's at current count. You have immediate access to all of these numbers without any capital investment.

    Your cost structure is known in advance. No extras for tech support issues, equipment replacement, or equipment failures. Just a single cost per user; or, if you prefer, a cost per port. We will provide you access to all the equipment you need; we will maintain and service it; we will provide you with our online tech support manual that answers 99% of customer questions. All included in your monthly fee.

    You will be able to offer the following services to your customers. (Our prices include all of these.) TODAY. Migrating your accounts from your modem bank couldn't be simpler. When your customer logs into one of our virutal ports, he will supply a login name that ends with @domain.com. This ending (realm) is used to route the authentication request to your radius server. It can arrive with the realm intact, or the realm can be stripped off. Either way, if your radius server accepts it, the user will be authenticated onto the network. You control who gets on and who doesn't simply by making changes in the list of users that are approved by your radius. (Just as you have always done.)

    Once all the users are logging on to the virtual system, you can shut down your modem bank, cancel your high speed data line, and sell off the equipment. The migration will put immediate bucks into your pocket.

    You will handle tech support just as you always have. End users will call you at your call center. You will have access to radius logs at your facility, as well as the radius logs at our level, to help you diagnose connection problems. These radius logs will show you logins with bad passwords, or incorrect usernams, as well as the phone number dialed to and dialed from. You will have records of the duration of each session and the cumulative usage by the end user.

    If there is something that your tech support people don't understand, they are welcome to call us for help. We have technicians on duty throughout the work day, and on call nights and weekends. You are never without support.

    You handle billing the same way you always have. But instead of paying for high speed data lines and equipment maintenance techs, you will receive from us a single invoice for all of your users who have used the system during the calendar month. We bill you either for the unique number of users or for the maximum number of ports in use simultaneously (either-or).

    Migrating from another virtual supplier

     If you are currently buying your dialup connections from another virtual supplier, there are some special considerations you should be aware of before you make the switch. The critical item is to determine how your authentication process is currently being handled. EIther you are authenticating using a radius server at your provider or you are authentication using a radius server at your location.

    If you are using your provider's radius server, it will be necessary to assign your customers new usernames. Although this may seem like a giant hurdle, in many ways this is the easiest transition to make. As you assign ne usernames to your cusomters, they begin to authenticate onto our system rather than that of your old provider.

    If you are using your own radius server, then your customers are likely logging in with a username that looks like user@yourdomain.com. With most network radius servers, the "@yourdomain.com" part of the login determines how the radius request is to be routed. In making a switch between providers, it is necessary to change the routing instructions that go with that realm to tell the authentications to go to a different place. Normally, this can be accomplished with little effort. However, if you are paying on a calendar month basis, it is necessary to make the switch exactly at midnight on the last day of the month in order to prevent getting billed for a month of service by two providers.

    This is only an issue if you are moving your accounts on the same backbone provider, e.g. you are moving from a Level3 reseller to another Level3 reseller. If you are moving from, say, Level3 to Qwest backbone, then the problem does not exist.

    Another simple way to avoid this problem is to change the realm part of your login, so that users change from user@yourdomain.com to user@anotherdomain.com. But, once again this involves notifying all users and getting them to change their login.

    What this really means to you is that you should contact us about a switch well before the end of the month and review all of the possible ramifications when you are not under pressure. If you will take this approach, we can make the switch for you and your customers as painless as possible.

    The Cost?