Project Update
1 Jul 09
We have not posted an update in a while but we have been busy since last November. The billing system migration is complete and every customer is now going through our Quickbooks program. We no longer use the old Hawki system in Ocala for billing but it is used for user login and authentication until a new system is in place. The old XP mail server in Ocala was dying and we were forced to move all the accounts to our primary mail server. This was actually something we had planned on doing but were forced to complete earlier than expected. All XP mail accounts were moved along with the mail in all folders. We could not move the address book information however. We did set up the new server to allow the old XP mail server settings to work but we need to have all of our XP mail customers make some settings changes for increased security. We have created a tutorial for this using Vista's Windows Mail program. No matter what mail program you use the settings are the same. The difference is where you have to go to find the settings that need to be changed. We ask that all customers complete the mail server settings as soon as possible. The webmail login for XP is simply http://webmail.xpinternet.net and you have to log in using your complete e-mail address. You can choose a traditional looking mail program, dynamic, or minimalist for those who check their webmail on a cell phone or some other mobile device. We are testing a new spam filter and when we have completed our testing then we will release instructions on how to help us train the system. A new backup mail server has been installed in our office and once we have synchronized the two we will have a redundant server in place in the event of a failure. The servers in Ocala are all due for upgrades and repairs so expect occasional late night outages during this process.
15 Nov 08
The XP Internet site is officially gone and the WebKraft Wireless page has taken its place. This site has been modified just for our Ocala customers. For those who are keeping the XP Internet e-mail address you can still access your webmail by going to http://mail.xpinternet.net/webmail/Login.aspx and logging in as usual. There is also a link on our home page. We are no longer handing out xpinternet.net email addresses and all new ones come from our webkraftwireless.net pool. We are slowly getting all of our Ocala customers moved over to our billing system and this has been quite an undertaking. We hope to have the transition complete by the end of December.
15 Sep 08
We have completed the move to fiber from our office to all of our Williston customers. The available bandwidth has increased by 300% and overall network performance has improved. In completing this project we have also split ourselves off of the Ocala fiber connection and we are now independent. We are also monitoring our network closely and will be making more improvements to help improve throughput and performance in the coming months. We are also doing more monitoring of traffic and if we see something strange going on from your connection we will be contacting you directly to see what is going on. Most of the time this means you have a virus or adware/spyware issue that is contacting hosts on the Internet without your knowledge. This can cause network problems for us all and may constitute you being cut off until the problem is fixed. Be aware any time that we spend repairing a problem caused by you will be billed per our General Terms and Conditions policy.
In our efforts to merge the new Ocala pricing plans with our current Williston plans we have created a few new options for our customers. Check out the pricing page for more details. If you are out of your current contract and wish to sign an additional 2 year agreement we can work you into a new plan or perhaps reduce your current pricing structure if you are a residential customer. You may stay month to month with the current pricing if you wish. For our Ocala customers we are also trying to consolidate pricing plans and be more consistent across those plans with the bandwidth. Please bear with us while we make a few system changes and get things squared away with the new billing dates and plans.
1 Aug 08
We are taking over the entire network in Ocala from our old partner XP Internet. We have instantly grown to over 400 customers literally overnight. This means we now cover the Williston/Morriston area as well as downtown Ocala and surrounding areas to the west and as far south as The Villages and Spruce Creek. We have a lot of work to do to make this transition as smooth as possible so be patient with us when you call. While we evaluate how we want to attack the network issues we have put our fiber upgrade on hold. We will still be moving all of our customers over to our local fiber loop soon but it is no longer at the top of my list of priorities. This is a very exciting day for us here at WebKraft Wireless so stay tuned for updates on our coverage area and plans for the future.
20 May 08
We are undertaking a lot of projects designed to improve our service, increase bandwidth to the customer, and gain complete control of our network from our partner in Ocala. The first phase of this project was the installation of fiber in my office. Phase two of the project was upgrading our primary tower which included installing all new shielded cables and grounding everything for the upcoming storm season and installing a new high speed backhaul link from my office to the tower. These two phases are complete. The next phase involves acquiring our IP ranges from Embarq so that we can migrate the users from the Ocala server to the one here in Williston. This will hopefully be completed by the end of the month if everything falls into place on time and testing goes as planned. When this happens you will be notified ahead of time. Keep your usernnames and passwords handy because you will have to log back into the WebKraft Wireless control panel once the transition is complete. For those with static IP addresses we will be contacting you on an individual basis and inform you of the changes required on your router or firewall. We have also lost our installer Tim, and his latest replacement Sven. We are currently looking for an installer and without one I am on my own.
Another current project involves upgrading our mail and web hosting server hard drives. This project will be completed on Thursday, May 22nd 2008. This will allow us twice the storage capacity of the current hard drives which helps with the massive amounts of e-mail our customers receive on a daily basis. We will still have to look more closely at the amount of space utilized by each customer on the server because some people have abused the "no limit" policy.
We have improved nearly every repeater point we have and put up a new one in the Duck Pond area behind Greenway Propane. If you are in that area and are interested in service please let us know. Check our list of other repeaters to see where we have expanded to.
27 Feb 08
We have ordered Fiber from Embarq and it is being installed as we speak. When the installation is complete we will be moving everyone off of the link back to Ocala and getting away from XP Internet completely. This will mean more bandwidth for the customer base and more control for us. When this happens we will make every effort to make the transition smooth but we expect some issues will arise. We will also be rewiring our tower about the same time and when this all happens we will be notifying the customer base ahead of time. We have been growing rapidly these last few months and were moving rather quickly until we lost Mike, our first full time installer. Now I am training a new installer, Tim, and it will be slow going at first while he learns the ropes. Please bear with us for a few months while we get back on track. I think March of this year may be our toughest to get through but when we come out the other side we will all be better for the effort. Be aware that the improvements we are making to the network will in no way affect e-mail or web hosting in any way. Those services are located on a completely different server.
28 Nov 07
The waiting list is being attacked and we are installing on average 3 or 4 new customers a week. If you have not heard from us in a while please give us a call to see how the software survey is going. Once that is complete we can schedule an on-site survey if things look promising. We have installed new AP's and stronger antennas at both B&G Seed and Starting Point expansion points. This means we can reach out farther in all directions from the antenna than we could before. The technology can go over 10 miles but with tree cover it something less than that number. If you are within a few miles of either location please give us a call and we will see how things look at your location. We have new 2.4GHz equipment arriving at the end of this week and we could start installing the first week of December for any of your repeater points. For those who have not yet sent in copies of the new contract form and credit card billing form please do so within the next few weeks. We would like to have all that up to date by the end of the year. With Christmas fast approaching we all tend to get busy and forget the small things.
1 Nov 07
WebKraft Wireless, LLC. has purchased the Williston branch of the XP Internet network. Now WebKraft Wireless is in the driver seat and we plan on hitting our installation list and moving forward. This also means we have new contract agreements and credit card forms to be filled out by every customer. Kendra will be contacting you regarding the new paperwork. We have hired a new employee, Mike, and he is currently training to be my wireless installation specialist. We plan on installing up to 5 new customers a week between now and the new year. We are moving as fast as possible to install new customers, improve our repeater point equipment, and upgrade those customers on the fringe with more powerful gear. Feel free to contact us regarding your place on our list and we hope to be installing those of you who are waiting very soon.
We have just completed a firmware upgrade to all our customer's SM's. There has been a new patch already released for a newer version of the same firmware that we may be upgrading to in the near future. These upgrades affect you only for a few minutes while we do the update. I try and do the residential customers during the day and business customers at night to minimize any downtime.
28 Aug 07
A lot of things have been going on behind the scenes in the past few months. We have not had much to report on project updates because of some of these items. First of all we have replaced all the Access Points (AP's) on the tower following a lightning strike in July. The new AP's have the latest version of software on them and this means we have to update all our customer subscriber modules (SM's) as well. This process does not take much time to complete but the few minutes it does take will prevent you from accessing the Internet. The new software upgrade should provide a little better service to all but is not a major change. Once all these updates are complete we will let you know in an e-mail. The last item is the biggest news. WebKraft is currently working on buying out our partner XP Internet. This is happening as we speak and should be completed in a few weeks. During this period you will notice that WebKraft and/or WebKraft Wireless will be billing the customers instead of XP. Once the customer base transition is complete our next big change will be bandwidth. We are scheduled to have fiber pulled to our Williston office within the next 6 months. When this happens we will be cutting off our backhaul to Ocala and our dependency on resources in that area. This means more bandwidth for you the customer, less downtime due to problems with the backhaul situation, and faster ping times to the Internet. Our next expansion is on the drawing board and hopefully will be complete within the year. This expansion is scheduled to be on a tower south of Williston on 41 just before the county line. This would help us capture more customers in the Morriston area including Starting Point, Ocala Highlands West, and surrounding areas within about 15 miles of the tower. This would also replace the current Starting Point repeater tower and improve performance to the customers on that particular repeater point. We will also be looking at hiring installers, lots of SM's, and ramping up our installs as quickly as possible. By the end of September we hope to be in full swing and hitting our waiting list of customers as fast as we can.
16 Feb 07
Our repeater is up in Newsome Estates and has several customers on it already. We made a mad dash before Christmas to get as many as possible installed. We installed our farthest customer from his rooftop 15 miles away. We are quite happy with the results of the installation and have proven that our upgrades are working well. The new year has been good to us. WebKraft and our partner XP Internet are now the second largest wireless ISP in the state of Florida. We want to thank our customers for helping us achieve this goal and helping us grow by word of mouth. We are looking at improving out Starting Point repeater tower and/or replacing it with a taller structure. For those waiting for that to happen please be patient. We want to make sure we explore all our avenues before making a decision. We now have a repeater point up at B& G seed. It was initially installed for that particular customer but we can improve the site to hit some of the neighboring community when the need arises.
5 Dec 06
Things have been going well the past few months. WebKraft now has 2 repeater points up and running in the area. Currently we are at Starting Point in Morriston, Adena Springs on 316, and a third is in progress in Newsome Estates. If you are close to any of these locations let us know when you call about your survey. We are also purchasing upgrade equipment for our tower. This new equipment will allow us to increase the number of customers on the tower and increase our power output. This will improve the signal to everyone and allow us to reach some people who were borderline before. We are also putting up new backhaul dishes which will allow us to increase our bandwidth to our tower. We are seeing tremendous growth in our area and these improvements will allow us to serve more people with better signal quality and more bandwidth. We are hoping to have all of this done by the end of the year. We will keep you posted on our progress. If any lengthy downtime is required for the upgrades we will let you know.
2 Oct 06
No news is good news and we have not updated this page in a few months because we have had no problems to report. We have been busy installing new customers as fast as we can and with an increased customer base comes money for improvements. Our NOC has been moved and is in a more secure area with power backup, cooling, and fire suppression services. We also increased our bandwidth for the entire network to compensate for the increased customer base. Steve Ward, my tower installer, starts taking time off this month for personal business. We will be cutting back on installations for the last two weeks of October and two weeks in November around Thanksgiving. Be sure to look for us at the Williston Peanut Festival on Saturday, October 7th.
10 July 06
On Sunday July 9th, we completed work on our backhaul installation/upgrade. We have reduced our ping times across the entire network from an average of 45ms to about 20ms. This is a major improvement to the network which most may not notice but the gamers will see a difference. VoIP service will also improve a bit as well. We still have more tweaks and changes to make before we are done so it still gets batter from here. We are moving our equipment to a new Network Operating Center some time this week. When that happens we will send an e-mail to all of our customers. It will affect connectivity during the move but hopefully we will only be down a few hours starting at around midnight while you sleep.
3 Jul 06
A lighting strike took our Williston tower down on 2 Jul 06 at about 6:30 PM. We went to the site and determined that repairs were necessary. By 12:15 on 3 Jul 06 our service was restored. We will be performing some system maintenance and upgrades in the coming weeks. These upgrades will improve our latency and performance once they are complete. The weather and other issues will determine how fast these items are completed. We currently have 24 modules in stock and I am personally installing them as fast as possible. John Stone, one of my employees, has left and I am currently searching for someone to replace him. This means that I am performing site surveys, installations, service calls, in store repairs, and other duties on my own. Kim Kelly, our new office manager, is doing well and is catching on fast. Kim does what she can but I am the only technical person at this time so please be patient.
17 May 06
Last night we began a series of tower projects designed to improve our network reliability and performance. We will be performing a few more tower climbs, weather permitting, this week and next to complete the project. Our goal is to remove one of the tower hops between us and Ocala thus reducing ping times, improving reliability, and re tasking the backhaul dishes to other projects and/or having them as spare parts. When the work is scheduled I will send out e-mails to let you know. We are working on our first major expansion project south of Bronson and if all goes well we will soon have another access point up and running that we can point to. Currently we have installed all our available customer modules (SM's) and we are waiting for more to arrive. Our customer base is growing every day and we appreciate the enthusiasm.
27 Apr 06
We have hired a new employee, John Stone, who will be helping with everything from office work to basic wireless installations. Steve Ward, our primary installer, is busy with other work following his 2 week vacation. Once he gets caught up we will start hitting our list again. In the mean time John will be doing on site surveys to determine if and how the installation will work. If he can install on a tower or eve of your home he can do so but the cable will be installed in a temporary manner until Steve can get out to finish the job. If a tower is not installed John can tell you how tall it will have to be to get connectivity.
18 Apr 06
My installer, Steve Ward from Ward's Electronics, will be taking a week off for a vacation of sorts. April 18th will be our last scheduled installation day this week. We are picking up where we left off on the 27th of April when he returns.
10 APR 06
WE ARE LIVE! We have started hitting our waiting list and are attempting to install up to 3 units per day, 4 days a week. At this rate we will be working on our list for quite some time. Kendra is contacting everyone on our list to verify their information. If you are on our list feel free to contact us and touch base to be sure we have everything correct. So far our furthest customer is 11.3 miles and that is very exciting. We are learning more every day about how the signal propagates in our area so hopefully we will be able to cut down on some of our "on site" surveys soon and be able to tell you over the phone what to expect. New customers are being added every day as well. We are trying to schedule at least one week ahead so please return our call if we contact you regarding an appointment. If we can't speak with you, we can't schedule an installation for you.
28 Mar 06
We have 25 modules on order and they should finally be arriving on 29 Mar 06. Once we get them programmed we will be hitting our installation waiting list. Please be patient and we will get to you all in good time. With over 200 people waiting currently and more being added to the list daily, we have our hands full. We want to install the units correctly, not quickly so please bear with us. I will be approaching the list with the easiest to complete being first, business customers second, and further away without towers of any kind will be third on my list of priorities. Feel free to contact us and see how things are going.