For several months I have been experiencing connection problems with my pre-paid 3G broadband connection. Frequently a message appears informing that I need to recharge even though I have not exhausted my credit, although the message does eventually go away. More problematic though is that the bars in the connection manager vary and sometimes I am informed that it is “roaming” (whatever that means) even though the computer is in the same location every day. I assume this is why in Outlook I frequently receive messages saying that the connection to the server has failed: “Server: smtp.gmail.com. Protocol: SMTP. Port: 465. Socket error: 10060. Error: 0×800CCC0E” and “Server: pop.gmail.com. Protocol: POP3. Port: 995. Socket error: 10060. Error: 0×800CCC0E”. This will generally right itself, but can take anywhere from a few minutes to (more often) several hours. The other interesting aspect is that while I cannot access email or the internet, the bytes count still goes up in the “Sent” and “Received” columns in the internet connection status box. This is a maddening problem because I now only have intermittent and unpredictable access to email and the internet. Can you help please?

Wireless 3G broadband internet is always a tricky item to troubleshoot, purely because wireless-based connections can be much more easily disrupted (compared with a wired broadband connection) since your connection relies on radio waves rather than a cable. Your diagnosis of the problem is correct – it is likely that your connection is dropping in and out due to signal loss (as you have described, the bars on your connection manager are tending to vary indicating the signal strength is variable) resulting in the inability to access your email. This is confirmed by the error messages being produced by Outlook which actually means (in English, rather than the relatively cryptic error codes): “The connection to the server has failed”. If this was happening all the time then we would need to look at your settings, since they would likely be incorrect. However, because this only happens intermittently, and we have established that your internet connection is probably not stable, that provides a much more plausible explanation for the problem – the unreliable internet connection is resulting in your computer losing internet access and thus being unable to reach the email (Gmail) servers.

Your patchy internet is also somewhat confirmed since you mention that the connection manager occasionally indicates that you are “roaming”. From what I have been able to find, “roaming” indicates that you have moved out of the coverage zone of your wireless broadband provider and are actually now using a different telecommunications provider’s network. This is significant because it does indicate that perhaps you are on the edge of coverage for your broadband provider, since there is a need for roaming (albeit, occasionally). However, perhaps more importantly this could be related to the message which you receive about your credit. Generally when you roam onto a different broadband provider’s network you are charged a much higher access rate, since your broadband provider needs to recover your cost of access plus the fees which are imposed to use a different network. Therefore, this could be depleting your credit much faster than you anticipate. Without knowing the exact details of your wireless broadband provider I cannot provide specific information on whether you are being charged more or not, but this is something that you may wish to check with your broadband provider. You can generally disable roaming so that you are not charged these higher rates, but that will probably result in you not having internet access in that particular area (since if you are roaming then it is unlikely that your normal wireless broadband provider has coverage in that area).

You also mention that the “Sent” and “Received” columns of your connection manager still change even when your connection does not seem to be working. This is probably just the standard background network traffic that is used to establish connections and do the associated setup procedures to provide you with a stable internet connection. Unless the figures are going up massively then you can probably assume that nothing is really happening.

Regarding what we can do to resolve this problem, unfortunately there isn’t particularly much since we are somewhat reliant on the coverage of the 3G network. You could try moving around in the house. For example, if you are currently using the computer and broadband connection in the basement level of a house then moving to a higher level with windows could substantially improve your coverage. Apart from this, you may wish to research whether any other wireless broadband providers can give you better coverage in your particular area.