Most of MSN's sites and services are undergoing hardware upgrades in preparation for MSN.NET. There is also a major bandwidth upgrade planned for next month which will increase the total potential thuroughput from MSN's sites and services to 5 Gigabits per second. MSN's long range plans show total thuroughput going up to 12 Gigabits per second by 2004.

Microsoft Passport will be undergoing their first major upgrade to v2.0 in 10 days, the 26th. There should not be a major visible change, as most of the enhancements are in the backend. The only visible changes will be to sign-in/sign-out designs, as well as your Passport member services pages where you can edit your personal information. Other visible changes are only visible to Windows XP users. You will also see Microsoft Passport rolled out in the next few weeks at a number of third party sites...which will dump their own authentication and wallet system in exchange with Passport. Starbucks.com, Ebay.com, Expedia.com (which will no longer be owned by Microsoft, but by USA Networks which announced today it will purchase a majority stake in Expedia for an estimate $1.5 billion dollars), and American Express come to mind.

MSN Hotmail is currently scheduled to upgrade to v9.03 on Tuesday, July 17th at 8 p.m. Pacific Time. Included in the upgrade is the first major user interface enhancement since Hotmail was acquired by Microsoft in 1997. Increased junk mail protections will also be available. During this upgrade, MSN Hotmail will also be moving to a backend server setup that will enable the service to deliver on the promise of MSN.NET.

MSN Messenger will be releasing an update this week that will allow you to save your buddy list to your hard drive. In the event of another major outage like that which afflicted users of the service two weeks ago, to restore your buddy list is as simple as importing the saved list.