April 4, 2000 Dave Winer Userland Software Dear Dave, We received your email today, as we continued to work the issues to find a solution to your problem, which we believe to be packet loss caused by capacity constraints at your router. Your email and web posting stated, among other things, that you had "43 outages since 3:17PM Sunday," and "Conxion picked PacBell as the T1 vendor, not UserLand, so the finger pointing is pretty useless." The Situation and Action Plan You have set up a "Track-PacBell" script apparently to determine if and when your Pac Bell circuit experiences any problem. This script is set-up to contact the Conxion web site from your servers, yet you have never talked to us about this approach or how the alerts would be handled. Had you kept us in the loop we could have jointly developed an escalation procedure, and developed a test which is more appropriate for testing circuit reliability. Nonetheless, it is readily apparent from your comments that you are attempting to attribute all problems to Conxion. This attribution is based upon the fact that we "picked" the Pac Bell circuit on your behalf. Unfortunately Dave, we all have the same technology limitations to deal with. Since your "office" is your home located in xxx, in an area not covered with lots of fiber like most offices, a Pac Bell cloud architecture is the only cost effective high-speed local loop technology available to you. Irrespective of the above, we have been working diligently on the problem, and we plan to attack it by implementing on your behalf and at our cost a Cisco router in place of the Livingston router, which was installed when you initially signed up for a 128K CIR service. Your circuit is currently pumping out more than 1Mbps almost continuously, and we believe it may be overstressing the Livingston router's capacity, even though it was the best router available at the time. (Even this stressing of the router would not be apparent, except that in November of 1999 we did for you what we have never done for another customer, and made your CIR full 1.544 Meg/second, although you only pay for a 128K CIR.) Your Communication and Posting Frankly, Dave, we were hurt and offended by your comments and the fact that you elected to publicly state them in you newsletter. Over the past three and one-half years Conxion has more than bent over backwards to meet your needs. We pride ourselves in meeting the needs of even the most demanding Internet customers. If fact, just 2 weeks ago on March 22, 2000, our most senior Conxion engineer spent 18 hours straight at your house (beginning at 5am) working to resolve Pac Bell problems with your circuit. You subsequently published a report on how wonderful Conxion was for these extraordinary measures it had taken. The History of our Working Relationship and this Issue When you first came to us as a customer in 1996, we made a deal with you that if after 6 months you did not like the service you did not have to pay. We worked with you to find an alternative to your prior experience with ISDN technology. We provisioned for you, and have been billing you for a T1 service with a 128K CIR. You were happy with the service and have been a customer ever since. As your bandwidth demand has increased over the years, we have expanded the capacity of your service, yet we have not modified your 128K billing rate. We retained the old rate as a measure of our loyalty to you. You have now publicly stated that you do not feel the same way in return about our extraordinary measures and services for you. Back in November of 1999 when you started experiencing problems with your T1 line our operations staff offered to work with you to perform detailed testing to isolate the problem. Our records indicate that you did not respond to multiple requests via email and voice mail. Nonetheless, we conducted work even in the absence of your participation and cooperation, including increasing your port speed at Pac Bell, but full diagnostics could not be finalized without your participation. Your Statement Regarding our FailSafe(tm) Premium Hosting Service The quotation you used ["If we're down for 26 seconds, our customers get one month oh hosting free. Compare that to the industry standard: one day free for 15 minutes of downtime"] is based upon a new premium FailSafe Hosting(tm) and FailSafe Access(tm) services that we announced last week and for which we will start signing-up customers in May. You do not have FailSafe Hosting or FailSafe Access. FailSafe Access requires a minimum of a T3 circuit and two local-loop connections to two separate "central offices". It is a premium price service for customers who want to have fully redundant connectivity. You can find all the relevant information at http://www.conxion.net/products/failsafe/failsafe_access.asp. Future Communications and Publications You stated that your next step would be to "run a PR-Newswire press release saying the [Conxion's] claims of uptime on your website are total bullshit." As mentioned above, you are referring to services which you do not pay for, have no contract for and for which you have no personal experience. We would view any statements by you such as these as untrue, injurious, and defamatory. Dave, such statements are NOT protected by the First Amendment, especially since you have now been informed of the facts. If you make these statements now, they are made with knowledge of their untruthfulness or with reckless disregard for the truth. I can appreciate your frustration, however, that is not a good excuse for bashing Conxion. We have the Conxion reputation and shareholders to protect, and even the history of our good relations in the past cannot encumber that interest. Let us collectively attempt to fix your problem, not place the blame. Our mutual aim and goal is that your circuit is restored to full capacity. For your part, you must be a true partner and work with us, not against us. Yours Truly, /s/ Antonio Salerno Antonio Salerno CEO cc: Mark S. Edwards, Esq.