An Eye Opener

I am now in the process of switching over my last few customers to Telmex. I offered to do this for my clients who were forced to switch providers due to me closing down Lagunanet.

When I am out and about I have had a few people come up to me and it’s always the same old shit. I am usually greeted with.

Hi Rod how are you?

Me: “fine thanks”

Them: Hows everything?

Me: “great”

And then there is a brief pause, and then silence as if I should be showing some sign of despair or maybe sadness, but the truth is I am so fucking happy I shut down Lagunanet. I started this business back in 1996. Yep (22 years ago) I lived for this shit” I still do.

I am proud to have been the FIRST person to deliver internet access Lakeside, yes, long before Telmex, and I was the first to offer high-speed internet. And I am damn proud of it.

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Termination of Internet Service In Riberas and Ajijic

This week I sent out the last couple of emails to clients in Riberas del Pilar and Ajijic informing them that as of the end of June I would no longer be able to offer Internet service in those areas, the decision was not easy for me, but from a financial standpoint, it was no longer feasible to maintain service there.

It has been a long time since I have posted on my blog, and for a good reason, the last two years have been a big transition period for me, I have been working on several projects, It seems like only yesterday  “1994” I was sitting in an old Telmex switching station in Chapala trying to help the technicians improve the local phone infrastructure so that Internet connectivity would be possible.

In 1996 when I would go to pay my phone bill at Telmex office in Chapala I would stare at a roster with a long list of signatures from people who wanted Telmex to provide Internet service. The list did little to prompt Telmex to do anything about it.The only ISP’s available where a long distance call away, which were the University of Guadalajara (UDG), Guadalajararve, and a few smaller companies offering dial-up.

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Whats New with Lagunanet

The last couple of years have been some rough ones for Lagunanet, having started this business in 1997 it has been a great experience, and while I do not get out much like I used to I still continue to serve my existing customers, there has been much rumour of me closing down which is not the case, as long as I have customers I will continue to serve those customers.

Many have fled claiming that their service with their new internet provider has been much better which I think is great, for me it has given me time to refocus on what I originally did before I started Lagunanet which is online marketing. Just like those clients who felt they needed a better service, I needed to expand and change things up for myself, they say everything happens for a reason, and I do believe that to some extent, but hard work makes everything else happen.

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Changes and More Changes

Last December we had contemplated moving our office and with my son in college it made perfect sense we could save some extra money on rent and to be perfectly  honest it got kind of old answering questions from people who did not even use our service, fortunately my good friends from Telmex now have that pleasure.

The ISP business is not an easy one because people just want things to work. I really do appreciate and love serving the customers I do have,  moving helped tremendously in more ways than one. Currently  I am gearing up for yet one more move,  hopefully this will be the last and final change for a while with the exception of new equipment and upgrades.

Because of my gracious and charismatic landlord we will be removing our tower from our original location and we have added a new smaller tower in upper Ajijic thanks to some long time customers and friends they have made this all possible, in the next couple of weeks we will be focusing on re-pointing clients antennas to the new tower and hopefully make it a smooth migration,  so far everything has worked well.

I am estimating that the migration and move will be completed by the end of this month December 2014 we have added all new equipment and will be transferring our  bandwidth contracts.

 

 

Phone Number Change

Hi All

Just wanted to let everyone know that the 7662877 will cease to function the end of the month, I am so happy that it is one less number I have to Pay Carlos Slim, after many years of paying 4035.00 pesos per new phone line,  at one point in time we had over 300. I guess I am to blame for contributing to that bastards wealth.

In any case you can still reach me at my El Chante phone number which is 01-387-7631768 If I don’t answer please leave a message on my machine and I will get back to you. You can also call my cell phone number which most of you have if you don’t e-mail me and I will send it to you.

 

Regards

Rod

Lagunanet is Moving

ElchantenetworkLagunanet opened up its doors in 1997 in a horse stable in San Antonio Tlayacapan. I  am proud to say we are the ones that started Internet connectivity Lakeside and what a challenge it was, I have learned a lot in those 17 years not only from a technology standpoint but from people as well,  for the most part is has been a great experience and I have had the privilege of serving all kinds of people from different walks of life.

We began offering dial up service with 33,600Kbps modems and later migrated on to wireless technology providing what was then considered high speed. We still currently provide customers fixed wifi connectivity in many areas of lakeside. If there is one thing I love about technology it is change.  I believe it makes us think and improve ourselves, those reluctant to change remain stagnant and personally I believe that is very unhealthy.

Our office in Ajijic will be closing

As of the end of December we will be closing our office in Ajijic, there are many reasons for doing so and a couple of them include the fact that we don’t do much retail sales anymore, another reason is that a large part of my customer base pay us electronically using  Paypal, bank transfer and many still currently pay us for 6 or 12 months at a time.

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Web Hosting In Mexico

close up of wires on web serverOne of the frequent questions I am always asked is whether we do our own web hosting here at Lagunanet. The answer is yes, while we do host our e-mail and DNS services the rest of my hosting is actually done elsewhere.

I own and operate several websites and chose not to host them locally becuase of several different factors.

One reasons is expensive bandwidth, this has always been an issue in Mexico, bandwidth is very expensive, while a basic T1 connection in the U.S can run as low as 100.00 U.S.D per month a Fractional E1 equivalent in Mexico can cost around $13000.00 pesos a month, it is pretty hard to handle a lot of services on a one meg connection, while we do have over 20 megs of bandwidth running in to our office, 95% of that is used solely for the purpose of providing fixed wireless internet service to our clients.

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Internet died After McAfee Software Update

Operating a small ISP, rest assured there is never a dull moment, and sometimes never a shortage of angry clients, especially when they have no internet.

Walking in to my office Monday morning.  I was bombarded with several phone calls from clients saying they had no Internet access.

After about 12 calls and a client bringing in their laptop, I figured out the issue was with an automatic update from McAfee, after further reasearch I found several articles including this one from scmagazineuk.com where it talks about the issue.

Read moreInternet died After McAfee Software Update

Latest Updates

It has been a while since I have had time to post on this blog, it seems in the Internet business there is always something going on. In the 15 years Lagunanet has been providing internet access, some things have changed and some have not.

Back to the days of dial up,  when people could not get connected because of wet phone lines or just simply dealing with the crappy Telmex infrastructure. While the industry has changed a lot on the surface, the same basic network principles still apply, and to me the only real difference on the surface has been an increase in internet speeds, and cheaper hardware.

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For the Frugal

Hi Everyone

I hope everyone had a great holiday and new year! I know I sure did, in fact this is the very first year after 15 years of owning Lagunanet I actually took a whole week off,  it was great. Although it seems there where a few upset customers while I was away.

One day over the holiday we had an issue with an access point, which was down for about 3 hours and  was replaced, not bad for a vacation week I thought. In any case there where a couple of people who decided to hit the reset button on the router and of course when you hit the reset button, it takes all the settings out of the equipment and requires the settings to be added manually.

Read moreFor the Frugal