(ASCEND) Spontaneous dropped calls with 56k modem--what worked for us

[Peter Lalor <plalor@infoasis.com>]

Hi all,

With the current thread about dropped modem calls under 7.0.1 I thought I'd
add our experience with that and how we resolved it. We're different than
most everyone else in that our user base is primarily Mac, but the solution
is generally applicable to any platform so read on and perhaps it'll point
you in the right direction. It'll certainly help you with your Mac clients.

We have a TNT that was running 2.1.3 and v.34 modems. We recently took it
to 7.0.1 and v.90 modems. With that came an influx of reports of
spontaneously-dropped modem calls, primarily 56k but also v.34, which
surprised us.

As we worked with the clients experiencing the problem, we came to realize
that those clients having trouble were running one of the several non-Apple
PPP clients available for the Mac, usually FreePPP. In every case,
regardless of client modem type, moving the client to Apple's own OT/PPP
fixed the problem. We also had them ensure that their modem firmware was
current, but that alone failed to fix the problem.

FreePPP and OT/PPP deal with modems differently, in that FreePPP allows you
to specify an init string directly while OT/PPP uses a CCL file that is a
profile of a particular modem model.

Whether the problem was in in the way the two configure the modem or the
way in which they handle PPP I don't know, but certainly FreePPP worked
fine with v.34 modems and older software on the TNT and choked for some
people when we updated the TNT.

It appears that client modem, line quality, etc. appear to have little to
do with it beyond what speed they can connect at. For reliability, the PPP
client made all the difference.

HTH.

Peter Lalor           Infoasis
plalor@infoasis.com   The San Francisco Bay Area's
415-459-7991 x102     Macintosh Internet Service Provider
415-459-7992 fax      http://www.infoasis.com/
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