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Ahead of the Crowd

UC Telecommunications Company is

First to offer Centrex ISDN in the Bay Area (1996)

First Internet Café west of the Appalachians (1996)

First to operate commercial DSL west of the Rockies (1997)

First to advertise wireless internet in the Bay Area (1998)

First to offer 5mbps (2000) and 45mbps (2003) wireless Internet!

First to write a business plan to offer TEN GIGABIT service in the Bay Area (2010)
Never found funding to do it! (And that's why you can't get 10gbps. Sorry!)

First to offer GIGABIT service in Oakland (2011)

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© 2011-2019, 22nd Century Artisans, Oakland, California. All Rights Reserved. "Fiber Neighborhood" is a service mark, property of 22nd Century Artisans. View of Bay Area from Grizzly Peak by Steven Rosen, used with permission. Eric Dynamic. phone: 734.709.0200. Site last updated July 2021.

Ahead of the Crowd

UC Telecommunications Company is

First to offer Centrex ISDN in the Bay Area (1996)

First Internet Café west of the Appalachians (1996)

First to operate commercial DSL west of the Rockies (1997)

First to advertise wireless internet in the Bay Area (1998)

First to offer 5mbps (2000) and 45mbps (2003) wireless Internet!

First to write a business plan to offer TEN GIGABIT service in the Bay Area (2010)
Never found funding to do it! (And that's why you can't get 10gbps. Sorry!)

First to offer GIGABIT service in Oakland (2011)

U.C. Computers

UC Computers was one of the best-known local computer stores in the Bay Area in the early '90s. We built computers for NASA, the UC university system and State colleges, and for local school districts.

Since we moved to Oakland, we no longer have a storefront, but we still build and service computers for businesses and for our existing residential clients. If you're looking for anything specialized - small form factor, specific hardware or what have you, give us a call at 510.316.5722.

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User email setup and tools

Default Setup

If your username is 'username' then your "Inbox", also known as your "spool file", is /var/mail/username.
You can edit this file directly if you like, so you can perform surgery on it (at your own risk!) The Inbox is currently limited to 500,000,000 bytes (500 MB) and you have to watch it, for now. If your Inbox overflows, additional mail cannot be delivered.
A directory "mail" was created in your home directory. This is where you would create a folder system to contain your email.
For historical reasons, the folders Sent, Trash and Drafts appear in your home directory by default. Since you designate in your mailing program where these files live, you can move them into the "mail" subdirectory as well as long as you tell your mail program. Email is fetched with either the POP protocol or the IMAP protocol. POP is deprecated but still supported. Only IMAP allows email to be stored in named accessible folders.
A directory "admin" was created in your home directory. This is where 'the system' (specifically, procmail) will write an email audit log file (procmail.log.) The contents of the admin directory are readable only by you.
The file named '.forward' in your home directory tells the mail system where to forward email. Currently most users' .forward files feed the email through procmail; this is from the sendmail days. That mechanism is probably no longer needed, since procmail will process the user's .procmailrc since postfix knows it's using procmail, whereas when formerly using sendmail, sendmail couldn't know. In any case, .forward allows you to forward a copy of any email to multiple destinations. In .forward, either separated by commas or newlines, enter each destination. To specify your own mailbox (!) which you must do if you specified any other destination, use "\username" (username being yours.)
By this means you can forward a copy of your inbound email to gmail or other place. In general, if you get a lot of spam, please don't forward email to gmail.
Email going to your Inbox is processed by procmail according to the directions specified in the file .procmailrc in your home directory. procmail is a swiss-army knife of mail-handling operations and can't be documented here; see Wikipedia, or "man procmail" on the system.
Most users are using the system default .procmailrc, which invokes spamassassin and bogofilter. Email violating spamassassin or bogofilter, or the in-house antispam filter, is put into a file (folder) name SUSPECT in your "mail" directory.. This enables inspecting the rejected mail on the off-chance something you wanted got tossed. You should periodically empty the SUSPECT file.

Tools

The central tool is procmail.
"fetchmail" is available.
"TMDA" will be made available.
The in-house command "sdpass" returns a code indicating if the in-house spam filter would fail the mail or finds a whitelisted user or domain. To use it in procmail add this recipe (if control falls through, the email was whitelisted or not blacklisted.: :0fW
| /usr/local/bin/sdpass
In-house command "mkquickfix" writes a procmail recipe file derived from scanning the user's admin/procmail.log file. The recipe accepts email from any sender seen more than once and blocks everyone else. You should only use this when your log file is large enough (has enough history) to fairly identify your correspondents. Once created, you must add new known correspondents to it before their email will be accepted, so using this tool "freezes" your known contacts as of the time you use it. (Documentation to be completed.)
I need to write a cron tool that will send you an email when your Inbox is filling up.
I have written a tool that will move email from one folder into another based on date (year/month.) I have to rewrite it for user use. It's a quick and handly tool for dealing with too-large Inboxes manually (as opposed to using an email program to do it.)
to be continued ...

In-house antispam filter

The in-house filter was originally written as a "milter" for sendmail. Thankfully, Postfix supports it. The directory /etc/mailfilter contains (mostly) user-readable data such that you can examine the table-driven rules the filter uses. A few files contain private data. The in-house filter does a lot of things. It checks SPF and it also consults RBL (public blocklist) tables. It screens headers for references to known-bad and known-good domain names. It catches patterns like "from (google/yahoo) reply-to (somewhere else)", which are discarded. You can request to be a BYPASS user, in which case you'll get email the filter would otherwise discard (except DNSBL and SPF errors.) Otherwise, faulted email is discarded. The filter does so much it needs its own ... (Documentation to be completed.) In particular, it was written anticipating user-interactive control via a web interface, and I would like to finish writing that aspect of it.

Email handling
Back to General Setup

Mail handling on Transbay.net

In general, if you've not received an email you think you should have, let me know.
If mail to or from a particular domain or network has any issues, let me know.

Firewall

The firewall does not discriminate who is trying to get in to send email, only from where, and I block a lot of places.
If you're curious whether I block a specific place, ask me.
The system cannot log anything about an email that violates the firewall, only that a mail transfer attempt was made from an address and refused.
A firewall block will cause a "failure to connect" bounce message to the sender, and only many hours, even days, after sending.

Ask your correspondents to let you know if they encounter this behavior with your email.

Domain name blocking

I block a lot of domains, both country domains like .tk and vanity domains like .accountant.

If you know you have a correspondent in one of those domains, let me know.

Mail server and nonstandard handling

The mailer does not bounce failed mail, it discards it. Postfix bounces 'unknown user', but email rejected by the in-house antispam filter discards it.
Most email is spam and most spam will generate bounce messages that nobody will read,
and that is too much more junk email on the Internet and too much work for the server, for nothing.
That means that the sender will not get an email saying their email to you bounced if for some reason the system rejects it.
The sender does not know that the mail bounced, so have people tell you if you didn't respond to an email when you would have - 'you never replied.')

The old motd:
I block email from most of the new vanity top-level domains such as .WEBSITE ad nauseum.
I also block many country TLDs: COM.AR COM.BR CN EU IN IO KZ ME TK RS RU SR SU RO and possibly others.
If you need bypasses for correspondents in these domains (vanity/country), let me know.
Note: China India Russia, so be aware!

User email setup and tools
Back to General Setup

General Setup Information

Account names are always in all lower-case. Both account names and passwords are case-sensitive.
Email addresses (username@transbay.net) are not case-sensitive, so username@transbay.net and USERNAME@TRANSBAY.NET are the same address.

Mail Servers

If your user ID is "username", then your email address is "username@transbay.net".
Our servers:

SMTP server (outbound mail): mail.transbay.net
POP3 server (mail retrieval): mail.transbay.net
IMAP server (mail retrieval): mail.transbay.net

SMTP (sending mail):
(1) use port 587 instead of port 25;
(2) Connection Security: STARTTLS
(3) Authentication Method:
OLD (current) SYSTEM: Encrypted password;
NEW SYSTEM: Normal password.
Provide your username where indicated.

If your program can't do TLS (and so far Outlook cannot) then you will not be able to use encryption.

IMAP, POP (receiving mail):
For now, on both OLD and NEW servers, use port 143 (imap) or 110 (pop), Connection Security None, and Auth method "Password, transmitted insecurely".
Secure ports 993 (imap) and 995 (pop) may work if you specify Connection Security STARTTLS, but the system may refuse.

Sending the password insecurely is fine if STARTTLS is used, since the entire session is encrypted.

Squirrelmail (web mail):
On the old server, squirrelmail's list of subscribed folders matched the contents of your ".mailboxlist" file, which Thunderbird also uses. On the new server, the list of subscriptions is maintained in the file ~username/mail/.subscriptions.If squirrelmail comes up on first use not reflecting your old subscriptions, you should be able to fix this by issuing "cat ~/.mailboxlist >> ~/mail/.subscriptions" and refreshing squirrelmail. The old server ran "uw-imap" and "qpopper", while the new server is using "dovecot".

Email handling is discussed more fully here.
User email setup and tools are discussed here.

DNS (Domain Name Service) Server

Primary DNS: 216.137.177.214 (dns1.transbay.net)
Secondary DNS: 216.137.177.214 (dns2.transbay.net) ... it is the same for now.

Acceptable Use Policy

We believe in Free Speech and in the broadest possible interpretation of the First Amendment. We do not police user web pages, email or postings to the Usenet. However, users are expected to comply with all applicable Local, State and Federal laws, and to observe at least a minimum of decorum. Do not harass or spam from transbay.net or from a colocated or remote networked server. We are responsive to outside complaints of harassment or abuse by users of our services. We reserve the right to intervene immediately and without notice in cases of suspected abuse. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, to suspend service until a dispute or situation is resolved to our satisfaction, and to revoke service if we feel it necessary. You agree not to allow anyone besides yourself to use your account without consulting with us in advance and obtaining our approval; the only exception is usage by immediate family members. Parents are expected to supervise their child's use of the service whenever there might be any concern for abuse of the child or by the child. We are not liable for the consequences of content accessed on the Internet. Your discretion is presumed.

To report abuse, spam mail, etc., report the incident or forward the spam (including headers) to abuse@transbay.net.

We do not permit our facilities to be used to perform unsolicited mass mailings (spam), commercial or otherwise. We do not permit users of our facilities to use spam to advertise their services hosted on our network. We reserve the right to block any and all Internet traffic which in our opinion has the potential to materially interfere with our business, damage our reputation, or interfere with other services on the Internet or the operation of our Internet access.

Online Payment

Sorry for the sparsity here, all there is for now is a PayPal "pay" button, where you can pay the amount you specify. You don't need a PayPal account to use the link.

Internet Services and Prices

Server services

Shell account.

The shell account provides a Unix login on our system and provides space for a personal web page. You have access to all the various development tools that people expect to find on a Unix system - Java, PHP, Perl, Python, C and C++ compiler, image processing libraries and tools, etc. Provides an email address that supports POP and IMAP.

Mail services for a domain.

Includes 10 email addresses needing an account on our server. Addresses that forward mail to another server are free. Additional local accounts are available. A single mailing list is available at no charge.

Web services for a domain:

We offer bulk rates for multiple domains and extended periods.
For each domain, gives you http://www.YourDomainName.com, includes virtual mail services (described above) and 1GB disk space, or more as arranged. We run the Apache webserver, with support for CGI, perl, PHP, MySQL, and JSP if desired.

Domain services:

If you wish to own your own virtual domain, it must first be registered with an InterNIC recognized domain registrar, http://www.internic.net/regist.html. We are a reseller for OpenSRS (Tucows) and can register domains and provide Secure Certificates for domains and other uses. It will be your responsibility to keep your domain name current with your registrar if we aren't the registrar. We configure your DNS records as desired.

The History and Mission of UC Telecommunications Company

A quick biography of UC Telecommunications Company

U.C. Computers, Inc., a well-known Berkeley computer hardware and software store on Telegraph Avenue, began offering dialup internet service direct to the public in early 1996, and by mid-1996 was the first ISP in the Bay Area to offer anything faster than dialup -- Centrex ISDN.

The store became the first Internet Café, either in the US or at least West of the Rockies, and was always the only Internet Café with T3 (45mbps) access to the Internet. (The only thing missing was the coffee ... you actually got that from next door.)

In June 1997, U.C. Computers had established a 440kbps DSL line (again the fastest thing in the Bay Area) between its premises and a local business further up Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, the first such service in operation, and actually advertised DSL service to the public a month ahead of Pacific Bell; in fact, the advertisement in Computer Currents probably forced Pacific Bell's entry into the market.

?? ->

Of course, Pacific Bell wouldn't allow U.C. Computers to use the lines needed to operate the service (making the papers, August 1997, SF Chron business section) -- they told us to become a telephone company.

So we did - form a telephone company. UC Telecommunications Company was formed in 1998 to operate the ISP business and the telephone company, which came into existence in the Spring of 1998.

By then, however, Covad had already secured funding to implement their DSL plans and had done deals with Pacific Bell to get started (doing something we had sketched on napkins in the store nine months earlier.) We were the 7th company to sign up with them, and Bay Area pricing for DSL was set between two companies in the Bay Area -- U.C. Computers and The Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) -- for more than a year.

Stymied by the telephone company for its copper in 1997, U.C. Computers looked for a way around the telephone company and discovered wireless gear that outperformed DSL anyway, and by early 1998 had commenced commercial Wireless Internet service, again the first such commercially available service in the Bay Area, and as fast or faster than anything the telephone company -- or anyone else -- had. By April 2000 we had introduced 5mbps wireless service -- again the fastest thing going anywhere.

In 2002 we relocated to Oakland, and then our market began to fail. We tried to introduce wireless with speeds above 10mbps but could not find wireless equipment providers who could do the job for a reasonable cost. By then the "DSL wars" had commenced, and just as the bottom fell out of the IDSN market when DSL arrived, the cheap DSL dropped the bottom out of the "expensive WiFi market". And so our business has been in the doldrums for the meantime. We focused more on the ISP and colocation business and still host bookfinder.com, the preeminent new-used book search service on the Internet, among other prominent and worthy clients (we host for free the Berkeley PTA and websites for all the BUSD schools, as BUSD does not offer such services!)

By now we are a tough little industrial ISP with a famous history and the intention and will and capacity to make more history providing the fastest service anywhere using a business model that will also make history ...

The Problem We Shall Solve:

The Telephone company (in any market) has no copper competition and so owns all pre-existing last-mile in the country. Then there is the Cable company, which is again a monopoly in any given market. Meanwhile, the airwaves are dominated by the endless advertising done by these companies. These companies make a show of introducing new services, but the fact is that they have no incentive to compete in a genuine way, because they continue to reap large profits without having to do so.

The FCC under Michael Powell had no problem allowing the telephone companies to stop having to discount services to competitors. But the unbundling rules were in effect in order to enable competition in the market, and when the FCC gave the telcos their wish, the telco monopolies ended up putting an enormous number of small ISPs out of business, very undeservedly. We small ISPs were why you could in fact get T1 service cheaper than the phone company would give it to you. We were willing to share, and they were not.

All the "telco" works for is its own enlargement: for example, SBC bought Pacific Bell and then bought AT&T, and changed its name. Now all profits go to Southwest Bell under the name "the new AT&T", yet while gigabit service is available to residential users in Slovenia, AT&T is still peddling 6-megabit service for high rates years after it was introduced. That is neither competitive nor just.

Optical Fiber is the only credible way to transport large amounts of data not only at incredible speeds, but reliably and cheaply, and the cost of fiber has dropped to the point of general affordability now. It is not Dirt Cheap; but it is Cheap Enough. The price per residence to bring Fiber To The Home has dropped beneath $700 and continues to decline. Despite this, the telcos and cablecos are not much interested in developing fiber, as it will cost money and their profit margins will decline! Meanwhile, gigabit fiber to the home (FTTH) is available in Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, and even Slovenia, but not in the United States.

Quite simply, we intend to build the network that the telcos refuse to build. We're going to build a "gigabit Internet" from the inside out.

The preferred model for our telecommunications future is that telecom should be made into a public utility the same as water and power. Getting communities to address the issue seriously is an uphill battle and will take time and media exposure. Our business model occupies that niche between now and the future, now when good, fast services are hard to find, and the future, where the people of any given community are the owners of their own network infrastructure. We will build one or more "Gigabit Fiber Neighborhoods", and in time interconnect them, in the expectation of extending Gigabit Fiber to 'the whole City', and hopefully to your city.