Dropping the Connection

So on this nice Saturday morning I wanted to pick up my mail, just like every wellbehaving netizen does. But then, always after 2 minutes the connection dropped. If you haven't yet noticed from my weblog, I'm on dialup at home. Maybe there is some impulse beep on the line (e.g. for charges). It's too regular to be caller id. And then, it's OTE...

The provider is OTEnet, state owned, pretty big, and therefore impossible to get any information out of them. The main piece of insider knowledge to get a connection up with OTEnet from a Macintosh is that you have to switch off "Enable error correction and compression in modem" for Apple internal modems. Some people even recommend going to v.34 modem scripts. So far I did not have to use v.34. But I had a couple of disconnects at the 2 minutes mark before. Usually when I survived that mark, I could stay online for an hour without problems.

Not so today, today OTEnet persists. Tomorrow it may be different, letting me connect right away, or tomorrow it might not work at all. For the moment I'm sending my mails over GPRS through the mobile. It's not like I'm addicted to the net, but a bit of "keeping the conversation going" with friends and family is real good when you are far away. It's good to have some choices for Internet in Greece.