Connection keeps dropping. Help needed.

Did you communicate your solution to Neotel so that they can include this in their drivers? Because, to be quite honest, I have NO IDEA what this means :confused:

I did however go into the properties of the Neotel connection and unticked ALL the boxes relating to PPP. Hopefully this will help :rolleyes:

The Rivonia tower was done last night (like in completely DEAD). Any idea's why?

Monad said:
No thanks to Neotel, I think I may have found the problem. I spent the first day of my holiday waiting for, logging, and debugging the ppp disconnections from Neotel. It turns out they have a buggy ppp implementation. Here's a list of problems and workarounds.

1. It turns out they do not support the CCP (Compression Control Protocol) standard defined by the ppp specification. I added "noccp" to my ppp peers file and things improved a bit.

2. They do not handle the LCP (Link Control Protocol) standard defined by the ppp specification correctly. I set "lcp-echo-failure" to 0. At least this stopped my side from disconnecting due to LCP echo failure from their side.

3. I noticed the last procedure before the LCP termination request was a VJ-compression packet request from my side. I added "novj" and this resulted in less rejects and naks in to debug log. The link was still dropping regularly.

4. Finally after reading the pppd man-page I threw in "nomagic" and "noendpoint" for good measure. These parameters are recommended for buggy peers.

I have now been connected for 11 hours straight without a disconnect. Once or twice in the last three months I managed to stay connected for up to six hours. This is a new record.
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Well, no, I haven't communicated this to Neotel. They wouldn't know what to do with information like this anyway. Besides, turns out all of the effort was for nothing anyway. I've already submitted my notice of termination of contract, but as Neotel makes you wait another 30 days, I thought I'd give it one last shot before the end.
Can't say I didn't try...
 
It's a pity that the consumer has to choose between the lesser of two evils rather that getting what they want (and pay for). On the one hand, you have Telscum and on the other hand you have the 10 Neotel towers. I remember when Ibubble came out, they had the same issues. Somewhere along the line, they improved their signal and connectivity and things started going better. Hopefully, in about a year or two, VAN's and other service providers could assist consumers like you and I in getting what we want. It is a pity that more time, effort and money has not been spent on research and development that would have prevented issues like this. I guess, in a developing country, everyone is looking to make a quick buck rather than providing service excellence.

If you manage to crack the problem, please let us know, otherwise, for the other consumers who do not really have a choice in who they use, hopefully we will see you back on the Neotel network when it is working properly :rolleyes:

PS: The only reason I am punting Neotel is because I hate Telscum more and there is currently no other alternative (cheap alternative that is... :p)


Monad said:
I've already submitted my notice of termination of contract, but as Neotel makes you wait another 30 days, I thought I'd give it one last shot before the end.
Can't say I didn't try...
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I vowed never to do business with Telkom ever again. I don't even call Telkom landlines out of a matter of principle. I get along just fine using iBurst iCall, Skype-out and cell-phones. More's the pity that Neotel sucks so badly. I support any and all opposition to Telkom wherever I can. If Neotel sucked just a bit less I would have stayed with them out of a matter of principle, but since their connection is almost completely unusable I really don't really have a choice.
 
New low for Neotel: On Dec 14 I had 137 disconnections! That's and _average_ uptime of 10.5 minutes! This is insane! Hopefully I'll be free of this sh_t soon.
 
How many other Neotel users are having these connection problems that Monad is having ?
 
Since I have started using the Telkom DNS servers as recommended by Orion...i only get disconnected after every 2 gig i download. when i hit 2 gig dl it disconnects. tho i am using windows to dial up not the neotel manager anymore and it reconnects right away without hassel...until it has to reconnect about 8 times then it gives me a hardware failure error and i have to pull out the usb and put it back in again and then its fine to reconnect. Im closing in on 80 gig so far :)
 
I stopped using the Neotel DNS servers almost from the start. I set up the routing so that access to the Neotel DNS went through the Neotel link. Since this meant that DNS would fail - and with it much else - everytime the Neotel link went down, I have almost never used Neotel's DNS.
I did try and reactivate the Neotel DNS once or twice to see if the whole disconnection thing was just some big brother nastiness, but found no real difference.
 
Monad

I get exactly the same as you, and have tried the same ppp options (before seeing your post) - with the same results. I keep getting connection termination requests from the peer (which I assume is their ppp server, and not the device)

Reducing the chat script to the bare minimum made the reloading of the usb drivers at each re-connect unnecessary.

At least I'm up to an average connection time of 27minutes - before I had an average of about 0.5 minutes.

A at+csq to the modem port tells me I've got a signal level of 22 - and using the same conversion as the gprs connections that would mean I've got a decent mdB level.

This does seem to be a problem with the Neotel servers.
 
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I've got two devices, next to each other. One on a Ubuntu system, and one on a Windows XP system. Both displaying the same symptoms.

The windows system use to be decent, dropping about once a day, and now dropping once a minute. The Linux system used to drop once a day, then dropped to about once a minute, and now running at about 27 minutes.

Interestingly enough I just moved the Windows device to another location - It's about 10km away, so I'm assuming a different tower, but not sure. The signal is about double that of the first location. I put it on a Linux machine, and have not had any drops in about 24h.

Perhaps the signal quality needs to be close to perfect for the LCP to not fail. Perhaps the ppp servers requires a low packet loss to keep the link alive?

Pity it doesn't just re-establish a LCP link when it gets a LCP TermReq, in stead of dropping the ppp link as well...
 
Does a telephone call work on a different "package" transfer? If you make a phone call, should the call not drop like the data transfers drop?
 
Seems speed related

I have neo prime unlimited package. Been getting good speeds and no problems until today... Connection keeps dropping, what I have noticed is if I limit my download traffic to 256kbps the connection stays stable, however if I go over 256kbps the connection drops immediately. This really sucks anybody know why this would be?
 
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