Line dropout drives me nuts

[Tea]

Especially for James - coz James seems to be the internet and coms guru round here.

All summer long, every night at 1:20AM exactly, my ISP cut me off. Every single night. This used to drive me nuts because it was just ten or fifteen minutes before my usual bedtime, and it seems a shame to redial for just ten minutes worth of surfing.

Then come the end of summer, a change. I set the clocks back to boring horrible winter time and volia the 1:20AM cut off is gone! Only one problem: there is now a 12:20AM cut off. (sob) 12:20 is even worse than 1:20. The cut off time, in other words, remained constant, it was just the local clock that is different.

Now the really interesting thing is that once I got so damn tired of Dingo Blue doing this to me I switched to my reserve account with Netconnect - and they cut me off at the exact same time too!

Right now it's 12:15 and if I don't post in the next two or three minutes, I'm going to get cut off again. And this time I'm on Primus.

I never get cut off at other times, bar the odd random event, maybe once every three or four days. Must be Telstra's phone line system? Or Dingo Blue's long distance billing system?

Or what?

12:18 - I beter hit SUBMIT.

 

[Tea]

12:19, and I mean "better" hit.

 

[Tea]

12:20 and I never pinned it down to the exact minute.

 

[Tea]

I pobably shoud adjust my clock correctly. I have one of those nifty atomic clock sync programs around here somewhere.

 

[Tea]

Yup! It did it again.

 

[The JoJo]

Uhh, my condolences, that can really drive you nuts !

Hope you find a solution to your problem ( xDSL, cable ? )

 

[adriel]

It sounds to me like someone in your household is playing a trick on you. Such as picking up the telephone, or if that doesn't work, simply cutting off your telephone connection for a moment through some other method. Once you find out who that sneaky person is and disrupt or put an end to their nightly activities, the problem should go away provided you remain watchful and vigilant against further attempts.

 

[Buck]

It sounds to me like someone in your household is playing a trick on you. Such as picking up the telephone, or if that doesn't work, simply cutting off your telephone connection for a moment through some other method. Once you find out who that sneaky person is and disrupt or put an end to their nightly activities, the problem should go away provided you remain watchful and vigilant against further attempts.

I think it's one of his photography assistants begging for more attention. You know they're nocturnal animals!

BR

 

[Tannin]

There is only me, the two cats Buck refers to, and Tea. Anyway, there are no extensions. And Tea is imaginary, so it can't be her.

In fact, most of the time there is no phone either, just a modem. I do have a telephone here somewhere but it's not normally plugged in to the wall socket. This makes for a peaceful life (especially when I forget to switch the mobile on).

One clue: if I redial right away I get "no dial tone" error. I think it must be something to do with the phone service, because it happens at the exact same time every day, and it doesn't matter which ISP we use.

I think it might be interesting to go and root out that telephone handset and see what happens if I start a voice call at 12:15 AM.

But who do I know that wouldn't mind being called at that time of night?

 

[Buck]

You could call James? How about Sol?

 

[CougTek]

You could call me (it's 9h20am in the morning here when it's 12h20am in Australia), but you pay the phone bill ;-)

 

[NRG = mc²]

Just call your mobile... cheaper than CougTek :mrgrn:

 

[Tannin]

Just call your mobile... cheaper than CougTek :mrgrn:

DOH!

 

[CougTek]

Just call your mobile... cheaper than CougTek :mrgrn:

DOH!

And Tannin and Tea could have a nice discussion together for once.

 

[Mercutio]

Tannin and Tea can't have a nice discussion if one hand is holding the mobile and the other is holding the landline!

How about a nice, relaxing call to your local time and temperature service? Or call the power company and complain about something; they're always up for that sort of thing.

 

[time]

Sounds like Telstra.

Back in the cobwebs of my memory is this thing about how they stop permanent comms connections on ordinary telephone lines by interrupting them every 24 hours. Businesses doing this had to make their modems auto-redial to deal with this.

But I must admit I hadn't heard about it in the last couple of years. Perhaps it depends on the exchange? That is, maybe the exchange capacity is too low so they try to discourage permanent connections?

 

[Groltz]

This is only partially relevant, Tony, but you might like to to read this. Your Aussie telco might be doing something similar, late at night.

 

[James]

Sorry, busy busy busy.

One thing occurred to me - do you have a back to base alarm? Most do a callout in the middle of the night, and that will interrupt your modem call.

Otherwise, I'd just call Telstra and ask. I'm afraid I'm not a voice network specialist, data is my thing (well, really, strategic product development is my thing, but let's pretend).

 

[James]

BTW you're going to have to get rid of Dingo Blue, given that they're closing down in 3 weeks.

 

[Tannin]

Steve: interesting link, thankyou.

Damn it James, I think you've hit the nail on the head. I had forgotten about the alarm system.

I dealt with the immediate problem tonight by a quite different method, BTW. Went to bed early.

 

[Groltz]

I dealt with the immediate problem tonight by a quite different method, BTW. Went to bed early.

Cheater!

 

[Tannin]

Yes Steve. And now I'm paying the price: I woke up at 4:30AM!

Oh, and Dingo Blue is fantastic James! Nearly everyone has gone off to find other ISPs now, and the few of us that are still using the service have the entire system bandwidth all to ourselves. Never seen a 56k modem link go so fast!

Three weeks to go.

Sigh.

 

[James]

Yeah, I was really happy with Dingo Blue too, although we only used them for LD and LCR. They must indeed be awesome at the moment, they have stacks of bandwidth in to Optus and from there it goes on our (ie. C&W's) international IP product, which flies. (Guaranteed 100% availability, guaranteed less than 1% packet loss, guaranteed RTD @ speed of light + 40ms between any two nodes you specify. I think it's the best product we've ever deployed.)

 

[James]

Sorry, LCR = Local Call Resale.