Providing Fixed Wireless Internet
to Iron County, Michigan
and Forest & Florence County, Wisconsin.

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Fast-Air Newsletter

Vol 2013-1     03/24/2013

Hi all,
Once again it has been 2 years since our last newsletter. We have continued to invest 10s of thousands of dollars in upgrades and will continue to try to bring you the most reliable service in the area. This is our 9th year in business so we will continue our customer promotions to show our appreciation of your continued patronage.

In our last newsletter in 2011 we had just doubled our capacity. We have now doubled it again and will be adding more by this fall. Some our our rural units are not able to provide the bandwidth we want to offer so we are adding additional towers in our current areas. This will allow us to migrate as many customers as we can to newer equipment that uses different frequencies and are capable of much higher capacity. We are planning 3 more towers this year and additional upgrades on existing towers.

We implemented a bandwidth portal last fall to allow each customer to check your bandwidth usage at any time. You can access the portal from the Data Usage Portal link on our website. If you have not logged in yet, you will need to use the Request New Password link at the lower left section of the page. The username will be email address we have on file for you. If you are unable to get logged in, please call the office and verify your email address. We will be increasing our bandwidth quota this fall after all our upgrades.

You can also set Netflix, Hulu and others to use less bandwidth and allow you to watch more programming from these sites. It is typically under the account settings. Look for settings for Manage Video Quality or Player Settings. I have tried this on Netflix using a Roku box and it did not make any significant difference in picture quality and almost cut the usage per movie in half.

Expanded Coverage

We will be adding an additional tower on the Southwest side of Sunset lake to provide better coverage to the west side of the lake and southwest of the lake.

We will also be adding a tower in Caspian and Gaastra to migrate customers to new equipment.

We will be working on the Swan Lake tower to improve performance on customers with the Non-Line of Site equipment.

Coverage maps can be viewed under the Services - Coverage Maps menu of our website.

We now offer VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service. This can replace your current landline telephone. You get a local number or we are able to use your current phone number in most areas. You can get unlimited calling for both local and long distance for $24.95/month. For more information check out our website under the Services menu and VOIP - Internet Phone Service. This service may not be available to some rural customers who are using our Non-Line of Site units.

Be sure to let us know if you change your email address. We send out invoices, system notifications, newletters, referral credits, free-month notifications and most other types of communication via email. If you do change it, simply email us at support@fast-air.net or use the Contact Us page to let us know.

Before you call about a problem, there are a few simple steps to try to get your connection working again.

1. - If you have a router, unplug the POWER cord from the back of the unit, wait 5 seconds, then reapply the power. Wait at least 1 minute for the router to completely power up before you try your connection again. If this does not work or you do not have a router then try step 2.

2. - Our power block (called a PoE) is typically mounted on the wall down near the floor near the computer or router. There is a black power cord that goes from the PoE to the power strip. Unplug the power plug from the power strip that goes to the PoE. (If you are unable to find the correct power plug, you could simply turn off the power strip. However, this may shut off your computer also) Wait 10 seconds and then replace the power plug or turn the power strip back on. You will need to wait at least 2 to 3 minutes for the unit to power back up and reconnect to the tower.

If you need to perform step 2 and this does not still get the connecting working, you may want to retry Step 1.

If after these steps your connection still does not work, call the office at 906-265-2003.

We now have someone on call during each weekend. If you call the office and leave a message the person on call will contact you to help with your problem.

We have added a lot of customers since the last newsletter, so I want to stress the need to run spyware removal programs. We recommend MalwareBytes be run at least once a month to keep your connection at top speed. Be sure to have it download the updates each time before you run the scan.

Note: We now recommend Microsoft Security Essentials rather than AVG Anti-Virus for anti-virus protection. Although newer versions of anti-virus programs check for spyware, it is still necessary to run MalwareBytes.

Whenever there are upgrades for the packages mentioned above, always check our website under the Help & Support - Software Links option. This is typically the simplest way to upgrade these software packages.

For more information on how to keep your internet speed up, go to the link Maintaining your Internet Connection Speed or find it under the Help & Support menu and then Troubleshooting & Tips.

Customer Appreciation

We will continue to give out referral credits and will again have a free-month drawing for 2013. We will pick 2 names per month. You can see the 2013 winners on our website link under 2013 Free Month Winners. We just want to thank you all for your continued patronage. We like giving back to our customers for their loyalty.

We would appreciate your feedback. If you have had any issues, have any questions, any suggestions, or comments. please let me know. You can reply to this message, or use the Contact Us page on the Fast-Air website.  Thank you for your patronage and getting out the word to the community about our Internet service. Feel free to forward this to others or refer them to the Newsletter link under the Company menu on the Fast-Air Website.On behalf of our staff, Mike, Joy, Michael, Timm, and Chris we truly thank you!