Having finally paid a miniscule fee (mostly out of gratitude for all the years I’ve enjoyed reading the boards) and actually been granted the title “charter member,” I thought I might occasionally post something. But I usually only get a connection around 24.0 Kbps, sometimes lower, and then about 15 minutes later, it randomly disconnects. Not that I’ve gotten very far in 15 minutes, because I have to refresh a page 2 or 3 times before it opens–usually it times out–and posting anything pretty much guarantees I’ll be kicked off line. What’s more, the only time I can connect at all is in the middle of the night. It’s fine when I can’t sleep, like now, but it’s a huge pain when I want to check e-mail in the morning. AAUURRGGHHH! Thanks, I feel better now. I wonder if this will stay connected long enough to post?
In my experience, random cut-offs can be sometimes caused by a bad lead or connection at your end - are the modem cable and the wall socket in good condition?
Should we assume you are unable to get a better/faster connection?
This is lightning fast, whippersnapper.
In the Navy, I routinely had to deal with TTY speeds of 75 baud. That translates to 10 bits/sec.
I’m one of the poorest countries in the former Soviet Union. This is the best it gets. Broadband doesn’t even exist here yet. As for the phone lines, you can usually hear someone else’s conversation in the background–don’t know if that has anything to do with it. And when my parents manage to get a line through, it automatically disconnects us after 30 minutes. Works that way with all international calls. I don’t think I can change any of it unless I move to a different country.
That said, I’m doing pretty well right now.
How is that possible? At that speed, what was the point? I would give up on this, but it’s my only connection to the western world.
Hi nifferka! Out of curiosity, would you care to tell us which country you’re from. A while back we tried to see whether the Dope covered the whole world, but the former USSR was sadly lacking on the list. Maybe you could do a ‘Ask the’ thread. I think there would be quite some interest for that around here.
Well let me just say that it’s nice to have people from all over the place around here, welcome aboard!
I hope even with the slow connect, you’ll stick around.
Did you spend time in the west? You speak english very well for someone in the eastern bloc states!
Sam
Isn’t that called Morse Code?
This is called crosstalk. It’s the result of poor isolation between wire pairs, caused by either damaged or low-quality wiring, or improper termination. Noise on the phone line is the most common cause of dropped or slow dialup connections, and if you’re experiencing crosstalk, you can bet noise on your line is an issue. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do. If you have access to the building’s wiring, you could try running a new length of good quality CAT 3 twisted pair telephone wire between the jack and the point the telephone company wiring connects to the entrance bridge. I don’t know enough about telco wiring standards in your part of the world to better advice you, though.
[dialup ISP tech support geek hat on]
Yeah, poor phone lines can cause slow connections, as well as frequent disconnects. If you’re hearing static/other people’s voice conversations over your phone line, you can bet your modem’s tripping over it.
If you were in the US I’d suggest having your phone company check the noise for excessive noise, and see if adding a filter helped but… dunno how that’d fly in the former SU. (Even here in the US, phone companies won’t guarantee data transmission, just voice.)
You can try to update your modem drivers; go to your modem manufacturer’s website and download current drivers from there, but it sounds like unfortunately you’re stuck with shitty connections due to a poor phone line.
Damn! I was going to slap around the punk kid 
with tales of 300 baud but you trumped me.
Oh, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you if you were hoping to meet some exotic person. I’m just living here. Tajikistan, that is. I’ve also lived in Moscow, Paris, and London, and my husband is English. But me, I’m an American. Sorry. Lived in more places when my dad was active service, and I guess I got the travelling bug.
Got disconnected again.
No disappointment at all, I just thought you had a lot of family there as per your reference to your parents. Most times, Ex-pats live in ones or twos.
Sam
Everyone has access to the building’s wiring. When we moved in and asked for our phone number, they borrowed a chair to reach a bunch of wires running along the wall in the stairwell, cut one and spliced it to another wire which ran into our house. For months we had people calling about an ad they’d seen, and we had to tell them that whatever the number used to be, it was ours now.
I think the problem’s terminal, but I’ll see if better quality phone wire from the spliced point helps.
I know this is the Pit, but…
I’m fairly certain what you meant to say is 10 characters per second or possibly 10 bytes per second, which would be just about right for a 75 baud transfer rate:
From here..
Welcome nifferka, from another 24.0 Kbps person. I’m miles from a main phone line, and we have the problem of getting knocked off line at times. I think it’s from poor wire quality and it’s usually worse in very wet weather. We don’t hear other voices though, I suppose because there are none to hear.
Enjoy your time here!
The throughput of the circuit I dealt with in the Navy was about 75 characters a minute.
Mind you, this was a teletype circuit running over encrypted HF radio frequencies.
All it was useful for was sending naval message traffic.
If it makes any 24k-ers feel any better, I spent a good 8 months on a maximum of 26k, due to a DACS box splitting the service between me and a neighbour because of a shortage of phone lines…this was while living 2 miles away from British Telecom’s major telecommunications research base. :rolleyes: