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BEV Transition Announcement

NOTICE OF CUSTOMER SERVICES ENDING DECEMBER 31, 2015

The Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) has served the citizens of Blacksburg and the New River Valley since 1993. At the time, the services offered through BEV were truly revolutionary, and made Blacksburg the most-connected town in the world. Over the years as BEV services have become available from private sector providers, BEV has retired those services (e.g., modem pool in 1995 and Ethernet operations in 1998). We are at a similar point again.

Today there are many options for website design and hosting in our region, and numerous free, user-friendly services for email and group communications. As Virginia Tech considers its outreach goals for the coming years, it has become increasingly apparent that it is time to complete the shift away from offering web hosting and email services so that BEV resources can be allocated to new, more forward-looking initiatives. With this in mind, we wish to inform you that BEV will be retiring its remaining client services at the end of this year. All active clients have been sent a letter via USPS with this information.

To help support your transition to new services, there will be no service charge for the remainder of this calendar year and no payment is due at this time. Your services will continue as they have been up to and until December 31, 2015. To begin the process of moving to other service providers, go to www.bev.net/transition for information about private sector alternatives at low or no cost, and suggestions for how to package and transfer your files in the way that best suits your needs.

This transition recognizes the success of BEV in that many of the services that it has provided in a speculative, experimental context are now widely available from a variety of providers. Virginia Tech's efforts to innovate Internet connectivity within our region are not at an end—in fact, we have ongoing partnerships and initiatives focused on expanding broadband infrastructure for our region and for communities across Virginia. Our commitment to foster the virtual community lives on.