All of us at Smartcom appreciate the opportunity to provide you with
quality data networking solutions. To ensure the continued reliability
of your network services we will be performing network maintenance.
The router(s) impacted by this activity and a description of the
activity may be found below.
***************************************************************************
NOTICE ID: 20150710-001

   ROUTER: Core Router X670-A
LOCATION: McAllen, TX

START OF PROPOSED ACTIVITY: 19-July-2015 12:00AM
    END OF PROPOSED ACTIVITY: 19-July-2015  2:00AM
    ACTIVITY TARGET DURATION: 2 Hours

CUSTOMERS AFFECTED: All
SERVICE(s) AFFECTED: Internet Access

Description of Proposed Activity:

Replace X670-A Core Router

============================ CONTACT INFO ===================================
Dedicated IP T1/Fiber Internet customers call: 888-302-1125
=============================================================================

======================== ABOUT MAINTENANCE ==========================
Smartcom schedules planned maintenance during the following windows:

Wednesday 00:01 - 03:00 (CST)  (Tuesday Night)
        Friday 00:01 - 03:00 (CST)  (Thursday Night)
      Sunday 00:01 - 03:00 (CST)  (Saturday Night)

The maintenance targets are the estimated start time and duration for this
activity. While we make every effort to complete our maintenance activities
as targeted, unforeseen circumstances may delay the actual start time and
duration. All activity will be completed within our defined maintenance windows.
===============================================================================
This information is provided to our customers for their private use only.

On 24 September 2015, ARIN issued the final IPv4 addresses in its free pool. ARIN will continue to process and approve requests for IPv4 address blocks.  Those approved requests may be fulfilled via the Wait List for Unmet IPv4 Requests, or through the IPv4 Transfer Market.

Exhaustion of the ARIN Free Pool does trigger changes in ARIN's Specified Transfer policy (NRPM 8.3) and Inter-RIR Transfer policy (NRPM 8.4). In both cases, these changes impact organizations that have been the source entity in a specified transfer within the last twelve months:

"The source entity (-ies within the ARIN Region (8.4)) will be ineligible to receive any further IPv4 address allocations or assignments from ARIN for a period of 12 months after a transfer approval, or until the exhaustion of ARIN's IPv4 space, whichever occurs first."

Effective today, because exhaustion of the ARIN IPv4 free pool has occurred for the first time, there is no longer a restriction on how often organizations may request transfers to specified recipients.

In the future, any IPv4 address space that ARIN receives from IANA, or recovers from revocations or returns from organizations, will be used to satisfy approved requests on the Waiting List for Unmet Requests. If we are able to fully satisfy all of the requests on the waiting list, any remaining IPv4 addresses would be placed into the ARIN free pool of IPv4 addresses to satisfy future requests. 

ARIN encourages customers with questions about IPv4 availability to contact hostmaster@arin.net or the Registration Services Help Desk at +1.703.227.0660.

SmartCom Telephone, LLC launches new site. Check out all the services that SmartCom has to offer for Residential, Business, Government and Education markets.

IPv6 is a looming upgrade to IPv4, the Internet's main communications protocol.

IPv6 is needed because IPv4 is running out of addresses to connect new users and new devices to the Internet. IPv6 solves this problem with a vastly expanded address space, but it is not backwards-compatible with IPv4. So ISPs have to upgrade their routing, edge, security, network management and customer premises equipment (CPE) to support IPv6. The alternative is for carriers to translate between IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, which adds latency and cost to network operations.

Our entire network will support IPv6 by the end of Q1 2013.

In a somewhat controversial move, Smartcom is giving each of its broadband networking users what's called a /64 block of IPv6 addresses, which represents more than 18 quintillion IPv6 addresses or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 to be exact. This is a massive amount of IP addresses given how long we have functioned in the address-constrained mode of IPv4.