Pavilion continues to be rated as one of the best ISP’s in the country by Internet Magazine and we will keep working to ensure that we do not slip down these ratings. This rating is compiled from a 100 of the top ISP’s including BT, Demon, Global, Easynet, UUPipex, Compuserve and is averaged over a 6 month period.

Over the next month Pavilion will be working in the following areas to increase the service we give our customers: K56Flex upgrade, more telephone lines, increased Technical Support hours, better user software in the form of CD’s and the chance to receive training from our staff. These services will be described in detail by the staff concerned in this Informer.

David Taylor - Managing Director.

PERSONNEL

Pavilion has strengthened its Systems department with Sam Eaton joining as a new member of the team on the 29^th of September.

As of the 1st of September John O'Farrell has taken over the new position of SchoolNet and Training Manager for Pavilion.

SCHOOLNET

SchoolNet, is our new education initiative, which will provide schools with an Internet connection, which can be used simultaneously by a whole classroom of pupils. In addition to the connecting the school's network we register a domain name for the school, and provide unlimited web space and email addresses for all the students and staff. The exciting part of this new initiative is that Pavilion work with the school to make the whole service self funding. The ten schools who are about to be connected through the new Brighton and Hove Unitary Authority have much to gain from the initiative as well. Further information is available from our recent press release on the news stand.

TRAINING

After last months responses, Pavilion will be offering Internet Training to its Individual and Corporate Subscribers. One popular request has been for onsite training and/or consultancy, which we are now happy to offer at £50 per hour with a 20% discount for Pavilion Customers. We are still interested to hear from you on what type of subjects you would most like training on, and when and where this should be done.

All responses will be actively looked at and I would ask you to e-mail training@pavilion.net with any suggestions you may have.

John O'Farrell - SchoolNet and Training Manager

TECHNICAL SUPPORT/SYSTEMS

As David mentioned above we've got some more enhancements to the service planned for the coming month. We're just waiting for some new telephone channels from Cable and Wireless and as soon as they arrive we'll be putting our K56Flex modems up for testing prior to installing them across the board. At the same time we'll be increasing our incoming telephone capacity from 96 to 136 lines. This will maintain our guarantee that there will be no engaged tones as the nights draw in and more of you access the Internet in the evenings. We've also been working hard to enhance our Technical Support department. This started last week with the installation of a new support direct-line phone number. You can now dial 01273 628027 and reach a member of the technical support team directly without coming through our switch board. Extra to that we've made plans to extend the hours of cover so that you can contact a member of the team from 7am to 7pm Monday to Friday, and from 10am to 3pm at the weekends. We're expect this to be in place by the end of November, probably sooner.

56 Modem Technology Upgrades

For almost a year now there has been talk of 56k modems. The promise of 56k downloads using a normal telephone line without the cost of an ISDN installation is quite an exciting prospect. We're glad to announce that we now have the equipment to not only upgrade our existing modem ports from 33.6k to 56k access, but we've got enough capacity to extend to 192 ports. That's twice as much as we've got commisioned for use at the moment. This means that we only need to have new telephone channels installed to use them, which in turn means that we can keep our promise of a 'no engaged tone' service.

There are currently two 56k formats available on the market to buy or upgrade to. These are X2 by USRobotics, and K56Flex by Rockwell/Lucent. Unfortunately until the industry has ratified the standard the two are incompatible. If you try and connect using a modem that supports one to a service provider that supports the other you will only be able to connect at a maximum of 33.6kbps, and will not be able to take advantage of the 56k connect speed. The good news is that most manufacturers are providing their 56k modems in a 'flash ram' upgradable form, which means that you can easily convert them as new unified version of the standard emerges.

In line with most of the Internet Service industry we will be supporting the K56Flex service first, and have the capability to easily install newer versions of the standard as they become available. We have the equipment here and are just waiting for Cable and Wireless to install some more telephone channels so that we can put a test service in place. We intend to upgrade our existing service from 96 lines to 120 lines, and add an additional 16 lines of K56Flex on an 01273 number for a period of testing. After the tests are complete we will add these 16 to the 120 and upgrade all 136 channels to K56Flex on the normal access number (0645 270000). As soon as the test number is available we will publish it so that our customers can try it out.

News Server

It hasn't gone unnoticed that we've been having severe problems with our usenet news service over the last month or so. This has been primarily caused by the general increase in spam postings and their associated cancel messages which has caused the news server a major degradation of service, as well as keeping me and my department up at night on pager duty. I'm happy to report however that this week we completed some major performance upgrades to the server and it is now back on line and happier than ever. As I write this evening (30th Sept 97) it is busy using most of our Internet bandwidth catching up with articles that it's been missing over the last week. The whole story is available to read on ticket 62, ticket 69 and ticket 70 in our problem reporting system.

Spam

Spam is the name given to the junk email that arrives in your mailbox without you asking for it, and fills your favourite newsgroup with get quick-rich-schemes. Unfortunately the amount of spam on the Internet is on the increase as is the amount of time it takes to delete it from your mail everyday. I personally get about 25% spam mail in my mailbox in the morning offering deals that I really didn't want to think about! Over the next few weeks we will be getting tough with spam and installing some systems to reject it from our network. It is unlikely that we'll be able to remove it all, but we will be looking very closely as to how we can stop sites like CyberSpam from sending random mail to our customers. If you've got an opinion on this please let our postmaster know. More about this issue next month.

Informational mailing lists

We currently have a reporting system that we use to inform you of system problems and planned service upgrades. This is currently available as posts to our usenet new group pavilion.announce, and on the web at http://techsupport.pavilion.net/netstat/. We have plans to make this more accessable by using a private mailing list and distributing updates to you by email. This will allow the flexibility that you can subscribe and unsubscribe as you require should you choose not to receive these messages. In preparation for this service we would appreciate it if you let us know should you not initially wish to be on the list. If this is the case can you please email our postmaster@pavilion.net with the words 'NOT ME' in the subject line of the message. Thankyou.

Josef Karthauser - Technical Manager