We've been hard at work at Sputnik on an upgrade to our DD-WRT firmware - we're getting close to release.

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To our U.S. customers - have a happy 4th of July weekend!

Sputnik offices will be closed on Monday, July 5th. Shipping will resume on Tuesday, July 6th. Networks are monitored continuously, of course, and we'll respond to any urgent or time-critical support cases.

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Actually, that should be SputnikNet version 3.3.7.5… but enough with all the decimals!

This is a nice new release with some important bug fixes, and enhancements to Quality of Service (QoS) controls. Among other things, QoS enables network administrators to prioritize important services (such as email) and limit less important ones (such as peer-to-peer file sharing).

Check out our changelog for more details.

SputnikNet 3375 has been rolled out to all servers in our datacenter. SputnikNet on Site customers – we’ll contact you to schedule a maintenance window.

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Wi-Fi Net News, and just about everybody else, covers Starbucks' transition from paid Wi-Fi; to quasi-free; to free, branded Wi-Fi.: http://wifinetnews.com/archives/2010/06/starbucks_goes_all-in_free_unlimited_...

This is good news for coffee and Wi-Fi lovers alike - and good for the Wi-Fi industry, too. It puts a spotlight on the fact that local Wi-Fi is about brand, and about venues building relationships with their customers.

Starbucks new Wi-Fi network, to be launched July 1, is the culmination of the company's multi-year effort to revitalize its brand.

Here's a quote from a letter written by Starbucks' founder, Howard Schultz, from early 2007:

Over the past ten years, in order to achieve the growth, development, and scale necessary to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores and beyond, we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have lead to the watering down of the Starbucks experience, and, what some might call the commoditization of our brand.

The complete letter is here: http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com/_/2007/02/starbucks_chair_2.html

In it, Schultz discusses various factors that contributed to the dilution of Starbucks' brand. The introduction of automatic espresso machines curbed the "romance and theatre" of coffee-making, formerly an "intimate experience" between the customer and the barista. Flavor-locked packaging was efficient, and kept coffee fresh, but at the cost of loss of aroma, "the most powerful non-verbal signal we had in our stores", along with the sound of coffee beans being scooped and ground.

Wi-Fi at Starbucks also was a drab, commoditized experience. Back in the days when T-Mobile ran the network, the login pages were splashed with large swatches of their corporate color, pink. More recently AT&T cluttered up login pages with cell phone promotions that bore no relation to the Starbucks brand. The fact that AT&T automatically authenticated iPhones in Starbucks stores was great for iPhone users, but what about coffee lovers-- Starbucks true target-- who happened to carry Android phones or Blackberries?

All this is changing now. Clearly Starbucks' realizes that their brand extends to the Wi-Fi experience. Starbucks will create the "Starbucks Digital Network" where they will invite participation of brands that reinforce the Starbucks' "lifestyle" - Yahoo!, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Zagat, iTunes, and more.

Starbucks now has the opportunity to use Wi-Fi to build a relationship with their customers that extends from physical presence in the stores to the digital world. This is the kind of Wi-Fi experience that hundreds of Sputnik customers are building all over the world - and it works.

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We're scheduling the last wave of our server migrations for Monday, June 14, 2010. Upgrades will occur in two waves. For customers in Asia/Pacific, upgrades will occur between 12PM and 4PM PDT (UTC - 7). For customers in US and European timezones, upgrades will occur between 8PM and 12AM PDT (UTC -7).

We estimate that each migration will take approximately 20 minutes, and will do our best to make it as fast as possible. While it's being migrated, a SputnikNet Account will be unavailable, and its APs will default to open.

After the migration, servers with "scc numbers" 14, 16, 17 and 21 will become scc24. So, for example if your account login was http://scc14.wifi.sputnik.com/mywifi, it will become http://scc23.wifi.sputnik.com.

APs will be automatically re-pointed to the new servers - only logins will change.

This server move is part of ongoing investment we're making in our cloud infrastructure to give our customers more performance, and to accommodate our growth.

(We agree - server numbers are lame. We're going to eliminate them, but we have lots of other great stuff to roll out first. So if you can't remember your SputnikNet login URL, you can log in through our web site, here: https://www.sputnik.com/products/sputniknet/login/index.html. Bookmark it. Or just click on the "SputnikNet Login" link at the top of every page.)

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We're scheduling migration of certain SputnikNet accounts to a new, higher performance server infrastructure on Wednesday, June 9, 2010 between 8PM and 12AM PDT (UTC - 7).

We estimate that each migration will take approximately 20 minutes, and will do our best to make it as fast as possible. While it's being migrated, a SputnikNet Account will be unavailable, and its APs will default to open.

After the migration, servers with "scc numbers" 01, 02, 04 and 08 will become scc23. So, for example if your account login was http://scc01.wifi.sputnik.com/mywifi, it will become http://scc23.wifi.sputnik.com.

APs will be automatically re-pointed to the new servers - only logins will change.

This server move is part of ongoing investment we're making to give our customers more performance, and to accommodate our growth.

(What's with the scc numbers anyway? Actually, we're working on getting rid of them. In the meantime, if you can't remember your SputnikNet login URL, you can log in through our web site, here: https://www.sputnik.com/products/sputniknet/login/index.html. Or just click on the "SputnikNet Login" link at the top of every page.)

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Sputnik offices will close on Monday, May 31, 2010, in observation of the U.S. Memorial Day Holiday.

Of course, network monitoring still goes on 24x7, and technical support will be available by email.

For our customers in the U.S., have a nice three-day weekend!

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We're starting off the new year with a new web site, PBX, and office!

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