MIDTEL NET commits to the open and non-discriminatory use of the Internet by its customers and commits to use reasonable network management practices to ensure an open Internet. MIDTEL NET will manage its network and provide access in accordance with the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) open Internet rules found in Part 8 of Title 47 of the Code of Federal Regulations and in compliance with any future rules adopted by the FCC.

Transparency

MIDTEL NET shall make available public information on its website http://www.midtel.net regarding its network management practices, performance and commercial terms of its service sufficient for consumers to make an informed choice regarding their use of such services.

MIDTEL NET will not unjustly or unreasonably prevent or interfere with competition among content, applications, service, or device providers.

Network Security and Congestion Management

MIDTEL NET uses generally accepted technical measures to provide acceptable service levels to all customers, such as application- neutral bandwidth allocation, as well as measures to address service attacks, illegal content and other harmful activities to protect network integrity and reliability. In the event of Denial of Service (DoS), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, spoofing or other malicious traffic, MIDTEL NET will implement inbound and outbound filtering on specific hosts. These actions will be performed to ensure reliability and availability of the Network. These actions will not be utilized for normal Internet applications and traffic.

MIDTEL NET reserves the right to prioritize traffic based on real time and non-real time applications during heavy congestion periods based on generally accepted technical measures. MIDTEL NET may set speed thresholds on the amount of data you as a customer can upload and download within stated time periods. If you exceed these thresholds, MIDTEL NET will temporarily limit the speed at which you can send and receive data over the MIDTEL NET access network. MIDTEL NET may use other traffic management and prioritization tools to help ensure equitable access to the MIDTEL NET network for all customers.

MIDTEL NET reserves the right to monitor customer usage to efficiently manage the performance of the network to ensure a sustainable quality broadband service is provided. Peak network usage is between 4 pm and 11 pm Monday - Friday and 10 am - 11 pm Saturday and Sunday. During peak usage times, priority is given to applications such as browsing, email, streaming, instant messaging, gaming and VoIP.

Congestion due to malfunctioning hardware and/or software will be remedied as quickly as network engineers can diagnose and identify the offending hardware / software.

Congestion due to malice will be remedied using any technique available, including protocol-aware filtering and rate-limiting, to control and limit the offending source. MIDTEL NET may seek criminal charges against those who inflict network malice. MIDTEL NET may also attempt to recover costs incurred from network malice.

It is not acceptable to use the MIDTEL NET network for any purpose that violates local, state or federal laws or to transmit communications that might be highly offensive or damaging to any recipients or to use the service in a manner that is unintended. It is not acceptable to interfere with, violate, circumvent, misuse, distribute or disrupt network users, equipment or services, which include but are not limited to:

• Attempting to obtain unauthorized access to any network or account. This includes accessing data not intended for end user customers, logging into a server or account without being expressly authorized to access or probing the security of other networks.
• Attempts to interfere with the Service of others including users, hosts and networks. This includes "denial of service" attacks, "flooding" of networks, deliberate attempts to overload a Service and attempts to "crash" any host.
• Distribution of MIDTEL NET Internet Services beyond the scope of your end-user account.
• Equipment, accessory, apparatus, circuit or devices that are harmful to the network, shall not be attached to or connected with MIDTEL NET facilities.
• Circumventing copyright laws and regulation, including the unauthorized download of music, video, images, books, software or content and/or other copyright protected works.

MIDTEL NET provides the ability to have Spam filtering with each customer's email address. Details of this service are listed on MIDTEL NET's website. MIDTEL NET will not ask you for your password in an unsolicited telephone call or email. If you believe your password has been compromised, you should immediately change your password to prevent the unauthorized use of it.

Blocking

MIDTEL NET shall not unjustly or unreasonably block access to lawful content, applications, services or non-harmful devices, subject to reasonable network management.

Discrimination

MIDTEL NET shall not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic over a consumer's broadband Internet access service, subject to reasonable network management practices. MIDTEL NET does not discriminate against any customer traffic. MIDTEL NET utilizes the network management techniques that are equal and standard across all user applications. MIDTEL NET does not modify its network to make MIDTEL NET directly served applications perform better than applications a user would access over the general Internet. The network management practices employed by MIDTEL NET do not differ between its directly offered applications and those general applications offered over the Internet.

Commercial Pricing

Please click on the following website link for pricing information including monthly prices, usage-based fees, and fees for early termination or additional network services: Internet Rates and our Acceptable Use Policy. Publicly available speed tests are available to any user or customer who would like to test their bandwidth speed. One provided by MIDTEL NET is http://speedtest.midtel.net. Another such site is http://www.speedtest.net.

Contact Information

If you have any questions regarding this policy, please contact MIDTEL NET customer service at: 1-518-827-5211 1-877-827-5211.

The Middleburgh Telephone Company is a proud member of the New York State Telecommunications Association