With the Holiday Season upon us, we want to extend "Season's Greetings" to all, and to thank you for the continued privilege of working together. We also want to use this opportunity to give you a quick update on our progress over the past year, to keep you "in the loop," as it were.

A couple of years ago, SoVerNet made some important decisions that are affecting you right now. First we decided to stay locally owned, and second, we began to take the steps necessary to provide you with the fast and reliable dialup access needed to be able to live anywhere in this beautiful region and work in the world. We have been building that new network and, as we connect more of you to it, we expect--despite all the testing and preparation--that there may be some unanticipated hurdles to overcome. Bumps, if you will, on the path to improved dialup service. The purpose of this note is to tell you where we in the process and where we are going. The first part of the transition gave lots of you faster dialup access with our all-digital '2222' numbers. While this transition worked beautifully for most customers, some experienced slower speeds and less reliability. Our support department found ways to teach most of our customers' rebellious modems to shake hands with our new equipment. But a few customers still had lower speeds. So we knew we were facing the third variable: not our equipment; not your equipment; but the telephone infrastructure in Vermont. The new numbers involved new routing over less advantageous telephone lines for some customers.

The critical part here is that you must understand that we consider it unacceptable for anyone on our network to suffer any degradation in quality of service. As a company, we must upgrade and advance technologically in order to survive. However, it is our full intent to bring everyone of you along with us. Whenever you perceive a "bump," please don't suffer in silence! We will work out a solution. We want you to stay with us, as you have done so far, and we want your quality of service to get better and better. To those of you who have taken the time to let us know where we've fallen short--as well as where we've surpassed your expectations--we owe a huge debt of gratitude.

We are now approaching the second phase of the transition, which connects our state-of-the-art dialup network directly to the region's telecommunications network. And with these steps, we gain control over a significant portion of the infrastructure over which your calls are routed. We are removing a portion of the "middleman" layer between our network and the public telephone system. We will transition you to our new connections and equipment, area by area, over the next few weeks--carefully and following extensive testing. Our preparations have been thorough, but we've been in this business long enough to know that unexpected problems may turn up. We want to hear from you if you notice a change in your service...for better, or for worse.

We are scheduling the maintenance necessary for these changes to begin on Tuesday 12/4 and Thursday 12/6, from 6-7 a.m. We expect to continue every Tuesday and Thursday until every customer has been transitioned to the new equipment. We will send a notice each Saturday reminding you of the Tuesday/Thursday maintenance for the ensuing week so you can plan ahead.

Looking ahead into the New Year, we anticipate more and better service and services. We look forward to our continued relationship with you, and we wish you peace, joy, and good fellowship in the years to come.