John Linton Two days after we put up the Exetel web site in January 2004 we opened the Exetel Forum (on 4th January 2004). Since that first day various Exetel personnel, including me, have spent time every day of the week since the first hour of the Exetel Forum's existence looking at the comments made by Exetel customers and responding to those comments to provide quick answers to customer and prospective customer questions and to subsequently address shortcomings in, or problems with, the various Exetel services or procedures. The Exetel user facilities were largely built from suggestions made by Exetel customers over the past three and a half years and were completely revamped over the past few weeks based on suggestions from many Exetel users. We have continually used the 'problem' sections of the user forum to pinpoint problems in different parts of the Exetel and our supplier's networks that hadn't been picked up by our, or our suppliers, monitoring systems. (the fineness of 'granularity' and latency sensitivity of 40,000 games players is an amazing monitoring methodology that no snmp based implementation can begin to approach). Of immense value has been the true discussion threads where new ideas for additional or expanded services have generated an enormous amount of informed comment and suggestion on how Exetel can do things better than we had planned or changed our direction in what had been planned. Exetel has been provided with the enormous benefit of volunteer administrators who give their time freely to help users with problems and whose detailed knowledge of internet use generally and Exetel's processes in particular provide a great deal of benefit to the individual who raises the issue and then to other users who search the forums for information on particular problems and issues. The 'formal' volunteer admins are supported by a huge number of other kind users who provide the benefit of their greater experience to less experienced users. Of course, the Exetel forum is just one example among hundreds of thousands of forums set up to address specific topics of interest to a specific demographic and I understand that such forums have existed for approaching 30 years counting the initial 'bulletin board' concepts in the 1970s. However, as someone who has been interested in chat room/forum concepts for over ten years now, I continue to be amazed at the constant stream of useful information and ideas that is generated from the Exetel forum. Three of the current major implementations that seem to be being enthusiastically 'embraced' by Exetel users have come from forum user suggestions and advice and two more will have allocated resources to them before the end of this calendar year. Perhaps like the original concept of the internet - users talking directly to users and peering points becomes more and more powerful as time goes by. Perhaps the internet has been hijacked by some carriers who charge so much money for the 'last mile connections' that there is very little money left to actually provide the hand holding services that were necessary in the early days of dial up and then ADSL, and perhaps to a lesser extent are still needed today. In considering the ways of reducing Exetel's operating costs the ideas for wifi or wimax 'hot spots' or some similar concept initially came from the Exetel forum which may end up significantly reducing 'last mile' costs and the forum itself has been a key element in reducing support costs and also, it must be said, sales costs. Both the forum concept and the 'hot spot' concept are in line with the original internet concept and perhaps both,in their different ways, will end up removing the disproportionate amount of the money spent on internet going to a few monopolies around the world. Then again, that's probably naive.