Having just entered cyberspace last month for the prime motive of accessing the net, my partner and I have been tormented by being kicked off the net consistently after only 5, 10, sometimes 20 minutes. Sometimes less! We had Telstra do a comprehensive MOLDS test (lines OK), we have taken disconnected the phone, disabled call waiting, surfed after midnight, called our ISP, and still gotten no joy. Telstra gave us some strings to put in modems extra settings but that didn’t help. Could it be our ISP?

This is a problem experienced by many people. I also had this problem with my modem dropping out every 10 minutes. The problem is very unlikely to be caused by your ISP. My solution was to turn down the FIFO. You can do this by going to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Settings’ ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘Modems’ control panel. Select your modem from the list and click the ‘Properties’ button, in the window which appears click the ‘Connection’ tab and then the ‘Port settings…’ button. In the ‘Advanced Port Settings’ bring both the ‘Receive Buffer’ and ‘Transmit Buffer’ down to the lowest setting. Click the ‘Ok’ button to close the window and then click the ‘Ok’ button in the next window to close that as well. Then connect to the internet to see if there is any difference. Another reason for the dropouts could be because your modem speed is set too high. To see if this is the problem, lock down your modems speed at 34000. You can do this by going back to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Settings’ ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘Modems’ control panel. Select your modem from the list and click the ‘Properties’ button. In the window that appears, under the ‘Maximum Speed’ heading, select from the drop-down box ‘38400′. Click the ‘Ok’ button to close that window and then connect to the internet again and see if the dropouts have decreased or stopped. If you are still having problems, I suggest that you seek advice from your ISP again because it may be a problem with your systems configuration.