re: Serious packet loss problems
Wednesday, December 3, 2003 at 10:53 am
Windows Me Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Jack Gulley
(5917 messages posted)
If you live way out in the boon docks as you say, your phone line is very long
(over four miles) from the Central Office (CO). DSL is not normally offered at such
distances (Although some do offer 192kbps/64kbps service on long lines.) Dial-up
connection speeds drop off real fast the longer the lines. When I visit my father
who lives four miles from even the closest paved road, keeping even a slow 2400bps
connection for more that five minutes is impossible. On long lines noise is a problem.
Most likely you or someone in you area complained about noise on the line and
the phone company installed noise filters on the lines to get rid of it, or there
may be water damage in one of their connector boxes. If you pick up a phone and press
a button, you should not hear noise on the line. If you do, there is a problem with
it. But if you complain, the phone company fix might be to add more noise filters,
not replace the lines.
If the phone lines cross roads several times, passing trucks can cause noise on
lines. The hot sun or cold at night can cause lines to stress connections and degrade
the quality of you phone line connection.
They do not guarantee good modem connections, only usable voice service.
If they do not fix it, then your only choice is to slow down your connection speed.
A slower connection can get through noise better. You may have to disable V.92 and
V.90 and force 33.3kbps speeds.
You did not say what you connection speed are. (I consider a USB connected modem
a problem anyway as this interface can cause all sorts of problems.) Not sure how
you do it with USB modems, but you can try slowing it down with modem commands. Try
putting in the "extra commands" line for your connection software the following command
to disable V.92 connections which your ISP may not support anyway.
+PIG=1 +PMH=1 +PQC=3
That will slow down the connection speed some and fall back to slower speeds which
may work better.
If that does not work, replace with S32=98 and if V.90 does not work, the
try S32=66 to force V.34 connections.
You could also try a good quality internal WinModem on a system with a PCI slot.
They may work better on bad lines. The Modemsite modem is the best quality WinModem you can get, by
far, and has the best drivers (Agere/Lucent). Has old style relay and transformer
for lightning protection on long phone lines. On my bad line, it gives 5K better
connects and fewer problems than my USB External V.92 modem did. The web site also
has lots of information on modems and connection problems.
If Cable Internet is not available, the Satellite Internet is your only choice.
Not very fast for the high price, but should work a lot better than any phone line.
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