Special to the Mercury News
The company that controls who gets what name on the Internet delayed for a week Monday its plans to delete the domains of 25,000 individuals, organizations and corporations for non-payment.
SAIC Network Solutions Inc., the government contractor that runs the InterNIC -- the white pages of cyberspace -- also upgraded its phone system and expanded its business hours partially to accommodate the flood of concerned customers.
The Northern Virginia company announced plans last week to pull the plug on groups that failed to pay NSI for the right to have their own address in cyberspace.
``We appreciate the significance of domain names to people,'' said David Graves, NSI Internet business manager. ``We thought that getting the word out in the media via our press release, saying that there was one more week to make payment, was a reasonable thing to do.''
It perhaps was more reasonable because many people trying to reach NSI on the telephone last week couldn't: the company's phone system was perpetually busy. The reason, Graves said, was that NSI had outgrown the capacity of its existing phone system and had another one that was about to be installed. The new system, installed Sunday, increased the number of phone lines reaching NSI by 50 percent from 18 to 24.
Many people had complained about difficulty in reaching NSI. ``They seem to be unable to communicate via fax or regular mail in terms of sending bills or doing anything. Their payment phone number is continuously busy,'' said David P. Pollak, president of Athena Design, a Boston-area software company.
Pollak also experienced problems with the security surrounding NSI's system for updating domain-name records, when his company's domain, Athena.com, ``was inadvertently switched from us to another service provider because the service provider inadvertently put in a change request for Athena.com, rather than Athena-Group.com,'' he said.
Only a quick technical fix by the other service provider prevented Pollak from losing all e-mail directed to Athena.com . ``Fortunately, the service provider was kind enough to make sure that our service was not interrupted,'' he said.
In addition to getting new phone lines, Graves said, NSI is now offering extended business hours: from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. (EDT) and from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (EDT) on Saturdays and Sundays. Having made it ``as clear as we could make it to people that they have to pay for their name, we are going to make it even easier to do that,'' Graves said.
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