It will be of interest to our Paola customers that we have hardware and have placed the order with Southwestern Bell to add an additional 24 lines for dial-up. Once this upgrade is completed, it will give is a total of 351 lines between Paola and Louisburg and a customer to modem ratio of right at 5.3:1. When you consider a normal average of 10:1 and and 8:1 being considered as good service, our ratio of 5.3:1 is what we consider as excellent and something we are very proud of. We have our loyal and faithful customers to thank for our success. Without your support and good word this would have never been possible.

Once again, we would like to wish our customers and their families a happy and safe Merry Christmas.

We continue to monitor Louisburg dial-up and restrict continuous usage to a limit of 10 hours. I have had several comments from customers that they have noticed it easier to connect on....which was our purpose. I have ordered the hardware necessary to convert Louisburg dial-up to 56k and add additional lines at the same time. Once I have a firm delivery date I will notify Mo-Kan Dial so that they can be prepared to connect to the new hardware almost as soon as it hits our door.

We would like to welcome some dial-up competition to Louisburg. Their timing is wonderful for us. Not only have they helped to relieve some of our dial-up issues by taking some of our customers but they have also helped us by simply being there. Competition brings the best out in everyone....helps to keep us on our toes. We wish them the best of luck and offer our thanks.

Also for our Louisburg customers, we will have our New Louisburg Office open starting Monday 12/4/00. Sebastian Sturm will be there 1pm-6pm Monday through Friday to provide local customer support and assistance either by phone 837-8400 or on-site in the Louisburg area. Sebastian will be sharing the office with Leon Rhodes and Louisburg Tax and Accounting (across from the new High School under construction).

All of our customers will notice something different on their next billing. After some research and several letters to the Kansas Department of Revenue, we have made the decision to exclude charging tax on our invoices. While this change will not effect our office as all taxes collected are forwarded to the State of Kansas, our customers will have a savings on their monthly Internet bill. I'm sure there will be a time of adjustment for our customers as well as with our offices. Any billing that has already taken place will not be changed. This change will go into effect today, December 1, 2000.

We continue to pursue Southwestern Bell to complete our Paola upgrade. They are also working to find us equipment as a temporary fix in Louisburg. Hopefully we will see progress on both fronts soon. We are actively monitoring continuous usage in Louisburg. Please do not remain connected to the service unless you are actually sitting there making use of our service.

As plans look right now, Sebastian will be in the Louisburg office starting December 4, 2000, M-F, 1-6pm.

This past Friday we started monitoring the amount of time that customers stay connected. Our policy has always been that our service is "unlimited access" and "unlimited usage". However we have also added that if you are not using the service to please disconnect so that others may use that line. In examining usage we found over 40 customers that had been logged on between 3 and 9 days continuously and an additional 15 between 10 hours and 3 days. In order to try and minimize busy signals, I am now checking usage and booting customers logged on for more than 10 hours. If you feel as though you require a longer connection time beyond 10 continuous hours, please contact me and we can discuss dedicated connections and related charges to having your own private dial-up number for access.

I have left several messages for our reps with SWB today trying to get an update on the upgrade we have been waiting on for so long. I hope they will have good news today.

With the departing of RPM Computer and Bob Powers representing us in Louisburg, I have been busy working on getting another local representative for Louisburg. After considerable thought, I have decided to place an employee in Louisburg. Today we started training Sebastian Sturm. He is already Internet smart but needs some customer service, technical support and paperwork training. He will be sharing the office with Leon Rhodes of Louisburg Tax and Accounting located across the road to the north of the High School. Sebastian will be in the office Monday-Friday 1pm to 6pm for technical support calls (837-8400 will be in service soon) and walk-in customers. Sebastian can also be sent e-mail at bastian@micoks.net. We anticipate he will be taking his place in the office the 3rd or 4th week of November. Because of space limitations we will not be working on computers in the Louisburg office at this time but Sebastian will be available for on-site setups and service calls during normal hours, by appointment.

It is also with great sadness that we have lost RPM Computer as our local Louisburg representation because of the continued SWB delay and customer complaints regarding service. I sincerely hope that all customers understand that in no way have we intended to cause Bob any problems or added stress because of situations with connectivity in Louisburg and Southwestern Bell. Bob and RPM Computer have been a valuable asset to us and we wish him the best with his future endeavors. We sincerely hope that our upgrading problem has not and will not have an effect on Bob's wonderful reputation for customer service with his computer business in Louisburg. I would like Louisburg customers to please call our Paola office directly with any technical support issues and mail payments to our Paola office in the future. I am currently looking for an alternate location for those customers who prefer to drop off payments rather than mail them.

We will be moving the 56k dial-up hardware to Louisburg very soon. When the new circuits are tested we will make the change over to 56k and add more incoming lines. If you are a Louisburg customer please check our Newsletter frequently, look for our notices in the Louisburg newspaper and information on your billing Statements for other changes coming in the near future that will effect you specifically.

John Boswell is on vacation all this week and will return on October 2, 2000. In order for me to have a little time away from the office as well as still have hours available for customers, we will have shorter business hours for this week only. We will open as usual at 9:00am and remain open until only 2:00pm in the afternoons. The last week of the month tends to be the time of the month that is slowest thus allowing us to have some time away from the office. Our phone system provides this temporary hour change, but for those who read this newsletter you get an extra bonus. Should you have a problem that requires immediate attention when the office is closed, you may call me at home at 913.557.5575 or on my cell phone at 913.638.6860 and I will do what I can to help resolve your technical issue. Please do not call with billing questions as the accounting software can only be accessed in the office.

We continue to bother SWB about the rapid busy signals that customers are getting even when we have plenty of open lines available for connections. At times there may also be a couple of quick clicks then a recorded operator message instead of the modem tones of our hardware. We will see if they can find and fix the problem. Intermittent problems of this nature are very hard to find.

After once again involving SWB and talking with Mo-Kan Dial and hours on the phone with our hardware programmer in Lenexa and ASI the problem was found early this afternoon. During the conversion of a Frame-Relay circuit into an ATM circuit by SWB they failed to program something properly that was preventing any data from being transmitted across our circuit between Paola and Louisburg. Once this error was found and corrected Thursday afternoon data immediately started passing through the circuit.

Because of the connection problem with Louisburg, our server in Paola became congested with the error messages it was creating when failing to communicate with the hardware in Louisburg. This caused the server to crash overnight. We were in the office at 5:40 this morning resolving that issue and had things back online before 6:30am. The file system errors caused by this crash were repaired about mid morning. The rest of the required system maintenance will be completed in the mid morning hours on Sunday.

As a reminder, Paola customers may experience intermittent dial-up problems while we complete another SWB upgrade scheduled for Thursday, August 24th. Shortly after completing this upgrade, the 557 dial-in number used by our Kansas City customers will be disconnected and they will have to start using the number listed above. This will greatly increase the reliability of and the number of dial-up connections from the Kansas City area.

Thanks for your patience while we deal with issues out of our control as well as working to meet the future needs of our customers as we continue to grow.

We now have Lois Smith working in the office part-time helping out with the accounting program as well as telephone technical support. She brings her Internet experience into the office and has proven to be very helpful.

Our prize winners for our 4th Anniversary drawing were: Sherman Marlow - the 17" monitor but elected for free year of service; Paola First Lutheran Church - year free service; Kenneth Servos - 6 months free service; and Stephanie Servos - 3 months free service.

Our operations have been almost trouble free since our upgrade in April. However, Louisburg customers have experienced a connection problem into Paola several times since May 30th. Southwestern Bell continues to try to determine the cause of the circuit problem. I have been working with Southwestern Bell very closely the past few weeks in an effort to upgrade us to a new service level that will allow more connects from the KC metro area as well as all Southwestern Bell customers in the 913 and much of the 816 area codes. This is a detailed list of where we can provide local dial-up service after August 24th. Once this change is completed, the dial-up number of 557-9666 for KC customers will be disconnected. Any metro customers using that number should call and get the new number or make note of it above.

We are finding more and more that customers appreciate the customer service offered by a small town ISP where we actually answer the phones and provide the support and answer the questions they ask of us. I want to thank the patience of the customers who have left messages on our voice mail system. Because of a software problem with the hardware, some messages are being deleted at random. We think the problem has now been corrected by the manufacturer.

Once our service upgrade in Paola is completed, we will be moving our 56k dial-up hardware to Louisburg for that upgrade. We hope to have that upgrade completed by mid to late September. Southwestern Bell has our turn-up date of August 24th. I will be working with MOKAN Dial in Louisburg to proceed shortly after that.

Upgrade Update: Things are still getting smoothed out from our ISP change. Newsgroups, if not already back for all dial-up ports, will be very soon. Southwestern Bell made promises that were outside of their standard policy, so it has taken some time to get them straightened out. With a little more fine tuning and programming, all will be working at 100% very soon.

It is hard to believe, but May 2000 brings our 4th Anniversary of providing Internet Service to our area. To celebrate this Anniversary, we will be doing some prize giveaways to our customers. Starting today, customers may register for a drawing of prizes. These prizes include free Internet service for: 12 months, 6 months and 3 months as well as draw for a 17" monitor. For Rules and instruction on how to register for the drawing click here.

Customers visiting our office may help themselves to other various items such as koozies, squirt bottles, cups, key tags, pens, and letter openers. It is thanks to our faithful customers that we have grown to where we are today. While it has been a lot of hard work, we have certainly enjoyed the challenge and look forward to growth in the future.

It has been a long hard road to travel to get this completed. Everyone has taken on responsibilities beyond their normal scope, including me. I have never claimed to be a programmer, so when I mis-programmed the dial-up servers in Louisburg with one little wrong number (typed in a "1" where there should have been a "2") and this resulted in customers logging on but not getting mail or web pages to come up, it was my fault. Everyone really liked the fact I made a mistake similar to the $150 "kroot" programming mistake of another employee, who will remain unnamed. :-) Even though this did not cost $150 for our programmer to repair, I am sure this will mean I can no longer bring up the "kroot" incident. :-( At least it did add a few moments of fun into a very stressful week.

We have already started getting reports from customers that the Internet is responding faster. Something we had expected to happen. It may take a day or two before everything is running perfect again, but as we remember from the last time we did this.....it will.

Once we are back online, you will not be able to connect without first making these changes. If you call our office, you will here a recorded message reminding you that we are offline. Once we are back online we will change that message reminding you to complete your changes. If you have a connection problem, please call the office on Wednesday and we will work with you to get you going again. Thanks for your patience and continued support to keep us growing as your only local Internet Service Provider in Miami County.

More to come on our 4th anniversary celebration and open house, including how to register our drawings to win a 17" monitor and free Internet service.

A new trojan has been discovered, called APStrojan. You will find information on APStrojan at this site.

You are welcome to circulate this information to anyone who you think will benefit from it. If you need any information or assistance, please get in touch with support@pspl.com.

The outage of service for Louisburg on Monday was the result of a telephone company related power supply outage to some of their hardware that controls our circuit between Paola and Louisburg. Once the problem was determined, service was restored very quickly.

We have placed the order to increase the number of dial up lines in Paola. This upgrade is a joint project with Southwestern Bell and some new services which they are offering to ISP's. We are scheduled to find out the estimated installation date on January 24, 2000. This upgrade will certainly help with access in the Paola area. Once this is completed, hardware will be relocated to Louisburg in order to complete phase two of this project: upgrading to 56k dial-up and adding additional lines.

Virus Alert: Plage2000. For more information: Click here.