ISDN Issues

[BrokenAngel]

I know this is an ADSL forum, but who knows about ISDN.

I have just got an ISDN line installed (2 months and 2 days of leave later) and am now using telkom as an ISDN ISP and have just bought that lil Telkom tiny USB ISDN modem. Now everything is installed correctly and all connected up correctly. The lil diagnostic tool that comes with the Tiny USB modem reports that the modem is working good and about 8 people at 5 different departments of Telkom have all told me that as far as they can tell my internet account is working and activated, my physical ISDN line is working and if all the diagnostics are good and the settings are as they all are on my machine then everything should work.

How ever, it doesn’t.

When I try to connect to the net, I get and error 651: “The modem (or connecting device) has reported an error”. Now the lil loop back test on the diagnostic tool works fine, only trying to connect to the net causes the modem to complain. I have even used my imagination and tried using different combinations of different USB ports, different ISDN ports, sticking in an analog line, leaving it out sticking in two, using none, uninstalling old analog modem drivers, rebooting, reinstalling the Tiny USB modem drivers, changing the channels that the dial up connection uses, using both, one or the other and even ‘no’ connections and no matter what I do, and believe me I stayed up until 1:30am yesterday morning speaking to various technical people cursed with the task of manning the Telkom technical help desks late at night and none of them have any idea, and no matter what I/we do everything is diagnostically good, but it cant connect because of error 651.

Oh and neither can they send anyone out to my place after hours and there is no one in my house during the day, so I am actually on my own with this. When oh when will this Telkom curse be done with…WHEEEEEENNNNN !!!!!!

I’ve still got some things I can try though. Tonight I’m going to see if placing a glass of water on top of the ISDN NT while I connect has any effect. I’ve also thought of trying to connect while doing a rain dance naked in my living room while boiling 3 eggs and a slice of bread in the microwave may lead to a break through. But I am starting to run out of ideas here.

So is there anyone out there who has used Telkom ISDN and the Tiny USB modem and had the problem where everything is installed correctly, connected up correctly and diagnostically all good and operational, but they cant connect because of error 651:“The modem (or connecting device) has reported an error” ?

Help !


Observing Humanity

[loosecannon]

it sounds like the driver is not installed properly and i am the last person to help with windows ...

uninstall completly driver and all apps
rebooot
reboot again
follow the installation procedure ...

drink a whisky
curse bill gates

it might just work

[mbs]

RFLMAO [:D][:D][:D]

[BrokenAngel]

Well, now it works. The drivers have always been installed correctly there is no doubt about that. The number of time I uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers !!!! There was a guy at Telkom called UV who managed to find out what was wrong. Thank you UV, much appreciated !!!! So the problem was, you can’t use area code dialing. Where you need to stick in the ISP number you need to just put the whole number including the area code in the ISP number box and then leave the area code box clear and disable area code dialing.

So maybe if anyone else comes here with a similar problem. I can tell you…don’t use area code dialing.

Now of coarse comes the other surprise. No one actually told me that with ISDN you actually don’t go that much faster. Instead of my usual analog 3 to 5Kbps, I now get, and wait for it, 8K…..wooooo hooooooo

I am told that on good day it could reach as high as 10K.

Well at least it connects in less than a second.

Hopefully I won’t get booted quite as often either !


Observing Humanity

[loosecannon]

well actualy unless you make 2 conections [Multilink 128kbs] you will not get above 8kB/s 8kBs=64kbs 16kBs=128kbs but there is a big difference in that a analougue modem is async and ISDN is sync.... ie 9bits per B vs 8bits for ISDN

a 64kbs ISDN link is like a 72kbs Analougue modem ...

TTFN

[BrokenAngel]

Ah I see. So in fact I can expect better performance then. I’ve only got the connection up and running this morning. So I haven’t had much time to see how it handles down loads and stuff. The first and only thing I did before I went to work this morning when it got connected for the first time was get my mail and go to CNN.com. then I just counted the bytes coming in on the connection box and it just looked like about 8k rather than 3k or 5k. But some one here at work told me that I’ll find it much better for downloading stuff from Kazaa for instance. So I’ll try go find something to down load tonight so I can see how it handles.

Observing Humanity

[ajax]

I've been using Getright for a while on my ISDN 64k. My downloads always (I can't remember any exceptions) come in at 7.2 kByte per second. I've heard of Flashget, will that perform better? I always thought the max for ISDN is slightly under 64k/(1024*8) or 7.8kByte per second. Am I missing something?

[loosecannon]

64k = 64*1024 so it is 8 not 7.8 (64*1000/8*1024)

remember there is always overhead the headers take up BW and the lower the MTU (internal cards need low mtu's often) the higher the overhead.there are also other packets on the link besides what you download and PPP has a bit of overhead.

[BrokenAngel]

I read some where (actually a few places), as if the binary decimal Kilo thing is not already confusing enough as it is, that in ISDN terminology, the normal SI unit kilo is the K used. So in ISDN kilo is 10^3 not 2^10 as is used normally in other digital terminology.

Still not sure about this but I did a quick search on Google just to make sure I haven’t seen this in a dream or something (and I do invent a lot of technological stuff in my dreams which I can never remember in the mornings).

http://www.ralphb.net/ISDN/defs.html

I once had a dream about 15 years ago where I saw an advert on TV in the dream for a new white chocolate slab filled with Jelly tots. In the morning after that dream I remember thinking to my self that it is a pity that the new chocolate in the dream was not a normal brown chocolate slab filled with Smarties. About 2 or 3 years ago ( 12 or 13 years after the dream) the white chocolate with jelly tots really did get released. I’m also pleased that there is a normal brown chocolate slab filled with Astros, which is almost the same as the original brown chocolate I imagined filled with Smarties after the dream. I actually prefer Astros to Smarties and I would have imagined Astros in a brown chocolate at the time of this dream except that Astros had not been invented at the time. So some of the technology stuff I dream about actually happens.

Now I’ve also had dreams (on four occasions in my life) in which there were gravity propelled space ships. In all four dreams the space ships looked very similar. In the one dream there was just on ship, and in the others there were more. In the one dream there were about 5 docked at some kind of space station. They all had a similar appearance and apparent design. And it’s the same design that has appeared in the other dreams I’ve had of gravity-propelled ships. They all had this longitudinal ring like structure around them which I understood in the dream was something to do with the gravity propulsion system. I also remember asking some one who worked as a medical personal on such a ship if he knew how the drives worked. This person in the dream told me that he was just a student and that his medic job was just a part time job and that he was in fact studying aeronautical engineering and that he knew pretty much exactly how the gravity drives worked. Now here is the sucky thing ! I asked him then how they worked and he explained it to me in fair detail. I remember understanding everything in the dream and I remember it making perfect sense. Except in the morning when I woke up I could hardly remember anything he said. Dam dam dam dam !!!!! I could be a billion air by now if only I could just remember all this s**t in my dreams. But I do remember some of the stuff he said and I do spend a fair amount of time keeping my eye open for any advances in particle physics that may appear to have anything to do with what this dood told me in my dream. For instance, he told me that gravity drives could have been built over 100 years ago (from what ever period of time the dream was set in) except that no one knew how to stabilize synthetic black holes. I also remember him saying that you stabilize a synthetic black whole by trapping it inside a magnetic field and that this was the one simple thing that no one thought of doing for over a 100 years and that it could have been done 100 years before his time. He said that it was previously always thought that it may be possible to stabilize a black hole in a magnetic field but that the field would have to be very powerful. In reality there is something to do with the frequency of the field and that the field does not need to necessarily be that powerful and that it could have been done much sooner if only some one knew this. Well, my main problem is my knowledge of particle physics is a bit dodgy or perhaps better said non existent, so it is unlikely that I will solve the problem. But I am curious that the people at CERN ( http://public.web.cern.ch) are upgrading their collider and will begin new high-energy lep collusions when its in finished being built in 2008. I understand that at that time it is hoped that the new energy levels attainable will enable the creation of the worlds first man made miniature black holes. Not quite as concrete as my jelly tot filled white chocolate dream, but much more interesting. So if there is anyone out there who knows all about particle physics and stuff, I think the dood in my dreams may hold the key on how to implement gravity propulsion and I’m still convinced that I can become a million air before 40, so like give me a call and stuff !!!


Observing Humanity

[loosecannon]

hey thx for that ... ive always used 1024 ...

[BrokenAngel]

Pleasure !

Observing Humanity

[brooko]

On 128k ISDN i average 14k - 15.5k while downloading.

I was looking through very old MyWireless posts a while ago and i think that ProAsm said something like the conection ratio of isdn is +-128k shared between 200 people.

So sentek are talking k@% if they are saying that the connections are slow because of connection ratios being in place, their connections are supposedly only shared between 30 people...

Unless of corse **i hate to say it** telkom actually know what they're doing, unlike those ppl at sentek....

Just a thought

[Perdition]

Telkom do manage their network well (albeit with an iron fist!) but contention ratios are a load of crap anyway as they give no indication as to the performance you are likely to achieve. 128k shared between 30 people is completely different to 128 Mbit shared between 30000 people even though the contention ratio is the same. As you scale up the numbers you can increase the contention without drop in performance.

Moral of the story : Contention ratios mean NOTHING. Rather judge performance for yourself or see what experiences other users are having.

[Karnaugh]

Yes in networks bit conversion is *1000, byte conversion is *1024. IIRC

- Colin Alston
colin at alston dot za dot org

"Getting traffic shaping right is easy and can be summed up in one word: Dont." -- George Barnett

[dorris]

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by brooko</i>
I was looking through very old MyWireless posts a while ago and i think that ProAsm said something like the conection ratio of isdn is +-128k shared between 200 people.

So sentek are talking k@% ...<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Yes, TelKom manage their ocntention better, but a 200:1 ratio on isdn is expected to perform as well if not better than 30:1 mywireless, Why?
Because isdn users cap themselves by time/cost constraints, users are never online too frequenty , and if they were to use it like adsl/mywireless users, they can expect R10000 phone bills.
So the probability of saturating the line is very small.
In regards to Telkos ADSL offering, yes they manage their bandwidth well, but users are mainly the ones responsible for managing the bandwidth (3GB Cap)