Volume 6 Issue 2

September, 2000

Office Updates

We are making a few changes at our office to improve customer service and develop additional Internet services.
The first, most noticeable change is that our lead technician and web developer, Steve Day, has agreed to work for us on a full-time basis.
Many of you know Steve and his technical skills. We are very fortunate to have him continue with us full time.
Bill is taking several courses this fall at Sun Microsystems to gain certification as a Java developer.
His training is part of our company's plan to expand our services into the software development arena and generate sophisticated web applications for business and consumer oriented web sites.
We also intend to develop several specialized applications for our subscribers' use. You can look forward to taking advantage of some innovative new services within the next year.

New Servers

We are currently developing a specialized web server that will be dedicated to providing online shopping services for retail businesses. This server provides powerful database support and a multi-featured shopping cart function which can be used with our existing Stronghold server for "munitions grade" secure e-commerce applications.
We also plan on developing another specialized web server that will be dedicated to supporting advanced web applications though the use of Java servlets.

New Modem Standards

Consumers can expect to see a new type of 56k modem in the near future.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) recently announced several new modem standards.
The new V.92 standard improves on the current V.90 standard by increasing upload speeds, reducing connect times and providing call-waiting features. The new V.59 provides practical troubleshooting features.
Consumers should be able to take advantage of these new features by flash upgrades to their existing V.90 modems within a few months. We'll keep you posted in future newsletters.

Help Desk Notes

It was a quiet month at the Cove Help Desk.
Occasional checks of our radius server showed a few unsuccessful logins which were most likely caused by noisy phone lines.
If you are having trouble connecting to our network, please call us!
We can provide many effective solutions to poor modem connections if you tell us about your current equipment and how it's set up.

SysAdmin's Corner

The Cove's web server suffered a hardware failure which made our web site unavailable for several hours in August. Otherwise, our network and servers operated without any incidents. Our upstream providers had no outages to report.
As mentioned in a previous article, we are currently busy developing new specialized web servers. We are also preparing for Lucent's flash upgrade to the new ITU standards and will notify all subscribers before the anticipated upgrade.

Subscriber Referral Program

Are you pleased with our service? Do you know someone who is unhappy with their current Internet/On-line service?
Why not do them and yourself a favor?
Just recommend our service. If they subscribe, we'll give you a free month of access!
They will appreciate your advice and you'll save a little money.
Again this month, over a dozen subscribers are getting their access in September for free - by referring new subscribers.

Everybody wins!

Internet Training

Have you seen our new web-based training packages?
They are convenient, up-to-date, and very inexpensive.
Visit this website at:
www.courses.cove.com
You can now even take introductory Internet and general computer use courses for free! Just visit our Help Page for access.

What's New at the Cove is a monthly publication of Cove Communications.

Publisher/Editor, Bill Ostaski

27 Congress Street
Salem, MA 01970
(978) 741-5300
(978) 282-3399
office@cove.com

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