* Welcome
* GST Update
* New Lines
* New Tools
* Account Changes
* Games News
* iiNet's Privacy Policy
* iiNet/Scoop Privilege club
* Proxy Information
* Account Details

Welcome

Welcome to the first Newsletter of the new financial year! Winter has finally set in with a vengeance, but the news is not all bad. In the July edition of Computer Choice, published by the Australian Consumers Association, iiNet again ranked number one in the country for customer service. We would like to thank those customers who participated in the survey for this wonderful result!

GST Update

From July 1, iiNet will be absorbing the GST for the majority of our offered dial up, ISDN and Cable Internet products.

This will save you and anyone else who chooses to use our services, from price increases of up to 10% associated with the Governments GST.

Unfortunately, the Pioneer account and our Cityspan service do not fall into this category and will incur price rises to cover for the GST. Should you use your iiNet account for business purposes, you will still be able to claim the GST Input Credits, as we will be sending you tax invoices for this purpose.

For your records, iiNet's ABN is 48 068 628 937. iiNet sees this GST absorption policy as a logical continuation of our commitment to ongoing quality support to you. If you have any questions regarding our GST policy, please do not hesitate to contact iiNet's Support team.

New Lines

July sees an upgrade for users in the Rockingham area. Our Rockingham point of presence now has 4Mbits back to the city. This is a doubling of the bandwidth.

Our Bunbury and Margaret River points of presence have both been upgraded this month. The upgrade included the addition of lines in both points of presence, and the upgrading of the Uninterrupted Power Supplies. Both sites also had Cisco Cache Engines installed, which should increase the speed and reliability of web page delivery. For Margaret River, there will also be an update of the core router and the access server to allow for the extra lines.

Our main Perth dial in number was upgraded by another 1000 lines this month. This takes the number of lines on 9213 1000 to 5560.

New Tools

There is now a facility to allow you, or any email address you specify, to receive updates on how much disk quota you are using. This runs every night and sends a report to the email address you have entered. That way, you can see if you need to purchase additional space or clean up some unused files.

http://members.iinet.net.au/members/accstat/quota.cgi is the page you can access for this information.

Account Changes

For the iiNet Explorer account, we have changed the terms of use to make this service less restrictive. From July 1, a "fair use" policy will apply to iiNet's Explorer account. If usage levels on the Explorer account exceed a "fair use" amount of 750MB in a month, then for the remainder of the month access to traffic during peak periods will be slowed. "Peak periods" will typically be in the evenings.

This generous "fair use" policy should be welcome news, adding to the already considerable attractions of iiNet's Explorer account such as flat rate internet access, our 2 hour guarantee no cut off period and 20Meg of disk space. If you have any questions regarding this "fair use" policy, please do not hesitate to contact iiNet's Support team.

http://www.iinet.net.au/help/newsgroups.html

Games News

This month, iiNet sponsored the highly successful UWALAN at the University of WA. At this event, iiNet powered much of the network, and provided some server resources. Approximately 180 people attended, and many tournaments were staged. The social atmosphere created a fun environment for gamers to meet and go head to head with one another. UWALAN was a great success, and we hope to remain involved in the future.

LAN days. You can learn all about UWALAN at the UWALAN website: http://uwalan.iinet.net.au/ All information about the next LAN in September can also be found here. The next LAN day is expected to attract up to 250 people. Come along, bring your computer and have some fun!

The release of the long-awaited diablo2 game last week has prompted iiNet to release a server. iiNet games has been testing a new "battle.net" server. This is not an official server but is still a fun place for people who like this style of game.

If you have a battle.net account, you should be able to connect. The address is battle.iinet.net.au.

iiNet's Privacy Policy

Our privacy policy is soon to be finalised. You may find it on our home page at http://iinet.net.au/about/privacy-policy.html

For a period of one month, we are seeking comment from the public and our customers in particular as to whether the privacy policy meets their needs in the form proposed.

Please feel free to visit the page and forward any comments through to Kimberley Heitman, Manager (Legal and Regulatory) via email to kheitman@iinet.net.au by the 7th August, 2000.

iiNet/Scoop Privilege Club

The iiNet/Scoop Privilege Club offers you reserve seating to a selection of Perth's best events with online ticketing, discount packages and exclusive offers not available to the general public, and an email members-only mailing list with updates on events and more.

The Scoop Privilege Club are now able to offer iiNet users $50 off the standard membership fee of $149. This $99 annual membership includes subscription to Scoop Magazine, information updates, booking and reservation privileges, and shopping privileges.

Visit http://www.scoop.com.au/club/ to find out more information, and remember to visit http://www.scoop.com.au/iinet/ to take advantage of the $50 off the full membership price!

Proxy Information

Due to regular queries to our support desk we would like to give you a bit of information about how your web pages are delivered to you.

Proxies are files, stored on a large file server at iiNet. This file server is called the Proxy Server. Each time a web page is visited by an iiNet user the page is copied to this server. When you visit that same page you will actually see a copy of the original from the Internet. However do not be alarmed, the proxy server will check to see if there has been any change to the site before delivering the web page to your machine. This is called transparent proxying.

It is important that you set your browser proxy options to "direct connection to the Internet", or "no proxy" so that when we do upgrades and changes to the system the transparent proxy can guide your connection through to the working proxy. This means you will continue to enjoy fast and reliable access to the web without interruptions.

For more information and settings please visit our Proxy Settings page at: http://www.iinet.net.au/help/faq/proxy.html

Account Details

We do sometimes need to contact our clients regarding the status of their account and would be grateful if you could check your account details to ensure that they are up to date. You can do this easily when next online by checking http://ragtime.iinet.net.au/bin/overview

Thank you for taking the time to read this newsletter, we hope it has been interesting and useful.

This newsletter was put together by Jody Morris, Chris Brown, Debbie Wilson, Darren Seneker, Neshka Erbel and Nathan Thomas.