Idle ISDN Connection

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Chunkyfeather

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Durban
Hi,

I am probably not the first person who has experienced this. The problem is this.

I have a 128K ISDN dialup (on Infinit Call) with ABSA as my ISP. However, when I dialup I will be downloading and surfing when my connection would just DIE :confused: I wouldnt have a disconnect, it would just stop responding, I cant browse any websites using NN or IE and i cant PING any websites. Then after about a few hours of this it would just start working again. I could also disconnect and reconnect then problem solved. However thsi defeats the whole infinit call thing.

Does anyone have any experience with this problem?

Thanks in advance for any advice you guys may offer.



(Please not anwsers like "Telkom is doing it to make me get ADSL" as I believe that is not the case. :) )
 
Hi Chunky. Yeah, been there, done that, many many times. Basically what happened to us is that the communication between the modem and the exchange got messed up and it appears to your computer as if the exchange has 'disappeared'. But the modem doesn't disconnect necessarily. Sometimes if it's a full moon and a pig walks by castle dracula playing a banjo on a tuesday, the connection comes alive again. My advice to you is 2 fold.
1) Accept that ISDN is a very unstable, old, dodgy antique connection standard that doesn't work over rotten local loops and make serious efforts to get yourself ADSL. Even if it costs more. We had a dodgy ISDN connection for 6 months and after calling telkom many many times and having countless technicians over, no-one could solve our problem. So we got ADSL and it is absolutely AWESOME. No more waiting till 7 to dialup. No more disconnections. Just fast, reliable and so convenient. And it costs us the same (About a grand a month) I assume you spend around R600-700 a month on ISDN, so get DSL 192 or 384 and an axxess or imaginet 10Gig account. We have an axxess 30Gig and it flies.
2) Call Telkom. Report a fault. Ask for the ISDN specialist in your area. You may have to phone many times to get the specialist. Just push push push and don't accept some lame visit from a normal technician - they can't help you. Then pray to Jeff the g0d of biscuits and ask for a miracle healing of your ISDN line.
I know some of this may sound sarcastic, but i've been pulling my hair out for 6 months over our ISDN connection and now that we have DSL, i have never felt more relaxed and at peace.
Anyone have more useful advice?..
 
very sad day

I have only had ISDN for 2 weeks now :( I am not beaten yet, surely there must be a way to right this problem. I thought the problem may have been with my ISP.

*sigh* I guess there is no beating the machine that is telkom *sigh*
 
Trust me, after 6 months, you will be beaten! :) To my knowledge, ABSA just resell SAIX accounts, so you already have a good ISP account. We had Telkom internet as our ISP (also SAIX) and they swear on the life of their mother-in-laws that they never disconnect idle connections. If you are feeling militant and have a lot of redbull and vitamins, then go with option 2 i suggested. The ISDN specialist came to our place and attached a network monitor and laptop to our line for 2 months to record every message and event on the line. In theory, if he actually bothered to come back, he could see what was causing the line to drop. But he never came back. And we still have his equipment. Worth around R36 000. anyone want to buy it? What we also noticed is that as winter approached, we got disconnected more and more until it was every single time we dialed up up for more than an hour. Well, if you have any other questions just shout. But if you are considering DSL, put your name on the list now coz we waited 2 months!
 
okay, lemme give it at least a month, maybe I can get Telkom to "check" my line. Here's hoping :D

Thanks.
 
i've had my ISDN for just almost two weeks and have not had issues, but for sure it must depend on the infrastructure that your location houses... i have left my ISDN using infinitcall on over the whole weekend while playing and downloading stuff... but my ISP is mweb though...

have telkom check out your ISDN and also talk to ABSA's helpdesk if they have one about your issue... i dont see the need to get ADSL as yet its just a farce...

broadband at 384Kbs? broadband should start at 1.5MBs minimum... but thats my opinion...
 
Have a look at your isdn adapter drivers, that was the exactly problem alot of rectron isdn adapter users had long time ago when I had ISDN, they eventually found a different driver which solved the problem.
 
I had this same problem while on ABSA. I also experienced immense problems playing UO. The only sollution was to get a different ISP. I switched to atlantic (same as telkom isp) and no more problems on UO or line going funny.

Please note, i used normal 56k dial up.
 
had this problem twice since i had isdn (for the past 18 months).
no solution but to restart/connect...
waiting for my adsl..........waiting.....still................
 
OKay, more info on this.

The problem seems to only be when I dial up my sencond line to get 128K ISDN access. Then I get errors on the line (Receive errors only). When I only connect at 64K then I get no errors on the line or any disconnects.

I have done some research and some results lean towards modem IRQ conflicts. But I have checked my IRQ's and the modem uses IRQ 19 and does not share this IRQ with any other device.

So looks like I will try an external ISDN modem (Have one lying at work) perhaps this will solve the problem.

The main thing here is 64K = No Errors AND 128K = 100 000's of errors.

Aish!
 
Chunkyfeather

I still have my old external Duxbury ISDN modem here at home ... my internal ISDN PCI card just gave me endless hassles under Linux.

Are you in C.T by any chance ... want to see if that makes a difference ???.

Welcome to have it for free as I am just going to bin it at some point in the future and I ain't ever going back to ISDN :).

Email me at [email protected] if interested
 
Yup, we had the same problem. 64k worked most of the time, 128k disconnected pretty much every night. Nothing worked. ISDN is cr4p, deal with it and get dsl as soon as possible..
 
I cant speak for 128K (yet) but Im running an internal Microcom Winmodem ISDN card on Fedora Core 3 and using Telkom Internet and have no problems. I had one disconnect about 3 weeks back.

Would love to go DSL but I currently get better MB/Rand with ISDN 64, so Im just waiting for the time DSL gets the same equilibrium - unshaped and uncapped.
 
Sounds all the familiar, I had the exact same issues several years ago.

At first I suspected my cheap mecer modem and replaced it with a USR. Still not succesful I looked to my ISP and made a change, once again the problems persisted. I had the Telkom specialists out daily for quite some time, this was a long time ago when ISDN was still priority and a techie would be out in under a hour if you logged a call. I had this problem in Windows & Linux.

Bottom line, single channel usage is great, bonding 2 channels does not work. You get more errors than bytes until your connection gets dropped.
 
Chunkyfeather said:
I have only had ISDN for 2 weeks now :( I am not beaten yet, surely there must be a way to right this problem. I thought the problem may have been with my ISP.

*sigh* I guess there is no beating the machine that is telkom *sigh*
Click to expand...

Well, I hope you are stubborn - it took me almost 3 years to sort mine out!
 
I'm going to guess here that chances are you're using a USB ISDN modem, in which case I'll sell you my PCI modem for R50.

The cause of the problem is WinXP and SP2, they somehow screwed things up for USB ISDN adapters.

After I went to a PCI card, I never had another disconnect while I had ISDN...
 
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