Pavilion is continuing to work hard at providing it's customers with the best service it possibly can as can been seen from the contributions from each department in this newsletter.

PERSONNEL

Pavilion is looking to complete its management and sales teams and are currently interviewing for the following positions. Please check the job specifications if you're interested.

Systems team gets larger.

Pavilion has strengthened its Systems Department with the addition of Matthew Spiers, who joined us full time on the 15th of December.

SALES

Email sales@pavilion.net to get the details of the Special Offer and the price reductions.

CUSTOMER SERVICES

Save money by paying annually.

Our accounts department would also like to remind everyone that they will save money by changing your subscription over to annual. You can save yourself about £60 by paying annually, the annual fee is now £100 exc VAT. To take advantage of this, email accounts@pavilion.net. Payment can be made by credit card or invoice.

SYSTEMS/TECHNICAL SUPPORT

I'm pleased to announce that on the 5th of January we will be switching the 56kFlex service on across our dial-up system. To take advantage of this you should make sure that your KFlex modem is running at least version 1.160 of the Rockwell code. You should check out our KFlex webpage to see whether we've got software for your modem, or contact your modem manufacturer for upgrade info.

For those of you who can't wait that long you may find that you can already get a Flex connection from our 0645 270000 dial-up number. This is because we're currently running a variant of Flex that doesn't doesn't give a complete handshake tone and therefore doesn't identify itself as a Flex connection. Some Rockwell code modems are not fooled and can still connect at the higher speeds. In tests we've found that both Hayes Accura, and Diamond Supra modems fit into this category.

There are still problems with the Rockwell KFlex implementation however. In particular V.FC, a standard which Rockwell licensed to Us-Robotics a few years ago, doesn't appear to be fully implemented in the recent KFlex implementations. Due to these problems some customers find that they can't easily connect anymore. As a solution we've setup another access point for these customers to use whilst they are getting their modems upgraded and/or Rockwell fix their code. The number to call is 01273 271614 (which was formerly our KFlex test service). Any user who discovers that they are having problems connecting (identified by a rolling modem handshake tone, followed by a dropped line), should contact their modem manufacturer for a code upgrade to V.34. Us-Robotics will upgrade the firmware in modems manufactured by them for free. (Call 0118 944 1000).

Josef Karthauser - Technical Manager.

Improved web statistics coming soon.

Our commercial web site customers are just about to see a change in the way they their web site statistics are delivered to them. We've spent the last two weeks producing graphical reports from their 1997 access logs, and these should be available on their sites within the next day or so (at the time of writing the date is the 23rd Dec.)

The new system offers two main improvements over the previous text reports. The level of detail has been significantly increased to incorporate reports by day, and hour, and full detail per host, and per page. The other bonus is that they are now much easier to access. Please check the documentation on the statistics at http://techsupport.pavilion.net/web/corporate/, or look in your old statistics directory on your web site for more info.

Webmaster.

Backbone to London now at 2mb/s.

As promised in last month's newsletter we increased our bandwidth to London, and to the Internet, by an extra meg to 2mbits/s. This happened smoothly on the 18th of November. As always our bandwidth usage graph lives at http://techsupport.pavilion.net/netstat/

Josef Karthauser - Technical Manager.

New technical support hours.

The new hours for Technical Support have started during the weekdays, the hours are 7.00am to 7.00pm Monday to Friday. The weekend Technical Support started on the 13th December 1997. They now operate between the hours of 10.00am and 3.00pm Saturday and Sunday. If you wish to use them please ensure you call the Technical Support telephone number, which is 01273 628027.

Technical Support.