From 1 September 1996 Hawkes Bay ISP Ram Management has connected to KCCS.

Ross Allan of Ram Management contacted David Dix of KCCS after reading a news article in nz.general posted by Peter Belt of Web World, an Auckland ISP connecting to KCCS. Peter had outlined how his MDDS connection to KCCS used Cisco routers with full payload compression enabled and this substantially increased the throughput.

Ram were connecting to the NZ Internet Exchange (NZIX) at Waikato Univeristy via a 128Kbit DDS. This is not using compression apparently due to the Cisco router at Waikato not being able to support compression.

KCCS has a Cisco 4500 Risc based router at the NZIX with ports for eight DDS connections, with four used before Ram connected. These were to Wellington, Gisborne and Tauranga plus the link to KCCS in Auckland. There are also two radio connections to ISPs in Hamilton which use an ethernet port on the Cisco..

Ram Management now connect to a port in KCCS's 4500 and will be able to take advantage of data compression after they obtain a Cisco software upgrade for their Cisco 2511 terminal server/router. This upgrade will be supplied by KCCS.

As part of this change Ram intend to reduce their link to a 64K DDS as this should easily cope with their existing workload when compression is enabled. The fact that the Waikato University Usenet News administrator has also recently announced that the alt.binaries newsgroups will no longer be provided will contribute to the load reduction is usenet news being sent to Ram.