My neverending story with DSL in this country

dg-1618

Hello everyone,

I am a lebanese guy living in Elissar (North Metn) and my story is going to be long.

In April 2008 I subscribed to DSL with Cyberia (256K connection).

Immediately after subscribing I started experiencing random disconnections, and by "disconnections" I mean the 3rd and 4th modem lights went off ... then back on about 30 seconds later (sometimes more).

I called Cyberia and when I realized (After weeks of calling and complaining) that they were not going to offer any solution to the problem I switched ISPs to terranet. The same thing occurred. I then went with IDM, again the same problem. Finally I subscribed with Sodetel and, alas, I had the same random disconnection problem which happened several times per day.

You can imagine how annoying this is and what it means: No online gaming ! If I'm going to play WoW for example to get disconnected several times per day then I certainly won't be able to play the role of a healer or tank as the whole team/party depends on me and that would mean a "wipe".

After almost 1.5 years of switching ISPs I had to unfortunately revert to the old "Broadband" solution offered by GDS.
Basically I went back to broadband internet in March 2010 and I paid 110USD per month for a 256kps (down) / 24kbps (up) connection.
Things were not perfect (sometimes my latency would go crazy and I wasn't able to do ICC25 man or big Battlegrounds since I would immediately get disconnected from the WoW server) but at least I wasn't getting disconnected several times per day.

Then in June 2010, my brother who lives in the same house decided to subscribe to a 256kbps DSL package (with Ogero whom I had not tried). He is still with Ogero to this day. The funny thing is: My brother (who is using the EXACT same telephone line I used when I had all these problems) is only experiencing rare disconnections (like once every 2 weeks).

So that encouraged me to subscribe to DSL again and after I read the numerous posts on this forum, I decided to try the "gaming" plan with Sodetel. I applied for a NEW telephone line (since my brother is using the existing one).
Yesterday was my 1st day and I already experienced 3 problems:

1- Around 8:00 pm latency in WoW was way too high (I called Sodetel and they confirmed they had a problem and they were working on solving it).
2- Everytime the electricity comes back (switching from generator to electricity which happens in the blink of an eye) my modem 3rd and 4th lights go off.
3- Around 11:30 pm the electricity was already on and everything was fine, then suddenly my modem 3rd and 4th lights went off.

I called Sodetel today and they said they will send someone to check the problem on site soon.

What do you guys think ? Why is my brother not having any problems when I am going through all these ups and downs ?
Could it be the fact that he has a 256k subscription while I am on a faster 512k (with double speed) connection which could be causing some high noise/interference?

I did a connection test yesterday for my Sodetel "gaming" plan subscription (speedtest.net and pingtest.net) and I was capable of downloading at 500kbps and uploading at 128kbps. Jitter was around 5ms and ping was around 150ms.

rolf

Do you have something against Ogero? They don't have "unlimited" and "quota free" options but you get what you expect, normally.

Did you also tried changing the modem?

Chup

Did you also tried changing the modem?

yea i second that
i'm guessing when you switched ISPs they re-configured your modem, so theoretically it's gonna have the same problem no matter where you go...

Joe

Unlimited is kind of important to him if he's into online gaming. Try another modem for a while. Problem most probably comes from there.

dg-1618

First of all, thanks for the replies guys.

rolf wroteDo you have something against Ogero? They don't have "unlimited" and "quota free" options but you get what you expect, normally.

Did you also tried changing the modem?

Two things about Ogero worth mentioning:

1) When I used my brother's Ogero account my WoW account got banned several times because Ogero kept changing my IP several times per day. This is an automatic procedure set in place by WoW to protect your account from hackers.
I called Ogero asking about that and all the support guy said was "Sir, this is normal depending on the load we have. There's is nothing we can do about it and your IP will change randomly".

2) Ogero refused to give me a 512kbps connection saying that my line doesnt support it. I don't really care about double speed but you need 512kbps to do 25 man raids and/or BGs. Otherwise you lag like hell and you keep on getting disconnected (especially when there's a 40 man ennemy raid attack on a city).

Chup wrote
Did you also tried changing the modem?
yea i second that
i'm guessing when u switched ISPs they re-configured your modem, so theoretically it's gonna have the same problem no matter where you go...

rahmu wroteUnlimited is kind of important to him if he's into online gaming. Try another modem for a while. Problem most probably comes from there.

Good point. I just bought the new Thomson wireless modem from Sodetel today and, to my surprise, my connection was not reset when the electricity came back today.
However, it's too soon to confirm this has solved the problem. I will need to test this for at least a week and get back to you about it.

One other thing, I've been kicked out from the WoW realm with an error message saying: "You have been disconnected from the server" several times tonight ... but I cannot say I am surprised (check this out http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=15111027587&sid=1 ) although this rarely happened when I was using a broadband connection with GDS.

vengeance666

your finding disconnection in WoW weird when doing icc25 ? let's no bring what happened with me tonight at icc where i couldnt even see where the lich king was ... i was trying to do a 5-man instance like 20 minutes ago and got disconnected 2 times before reaching the first boss , im using VISP 256k ... something should be done about this !

bigjudge

To get rid of interuption when the power switch off between generator and electricity, simply buy a $50 UPS, I had the same issue, that solved my problem (try best one ups) really good. I also had intermittent disconnections, that turned out to be the old wiring in my house, changed them all now i have no issues. Good luck.

dg-1618

vengeance666 wroteur finding disconnection in WoW weird when doing icc25 ? let's no bring what happened with me tonight at icc where i couldnt even see where the lich king was ... i was trying to do a 5-man instance like 20 minutes ago and got disconnected 2 times before reaching the first boss , im using VISP 256k ... something should be done about this !

Yeah, it looks like patch 4.0.1 messed up the game big time by introducing a huge number of bugs (extreme low FPS in Dalaran, constant disconnection with "Deserter" debuff in BGs, "Inspect" function not working, lag spikes, etc...).
Just check the wow-europe forums (technical forums) to see how many people are actually complaining that the game is really in a bad shape right now. Many of those players are on extremely fast and stable fiber optics connections.

There are a few things you can do to help your ISP troubleshoot the problem at hand (because Blizzard won't even reply to your post even when they ask you for this information).
You can, for example, do a traceroute and a pathping to the Battle.net logon server and/or your realm.
Then, send this info to your ISP which might notice a packet loss somewhere between your PC and the realm/server in question and might be able to take some action on an international level.
However, I suspect these things take time.

bigjudge wroteTo get rid of interuption when the power switch off between generator and electricity, simply buy a $50 UPS, I had the same issue, that solved my problem (try best one ups) really good. I also had intermittent disconnections, that turned out to be the old wiring in my house, changed them all now i have no issues. Good luck.

I already have 2 UPS units running. One for my PC and another for the monitor and the DSL modem.
As for the wiring, I had an electrician come to my house and install a new "shielded" twisted pair network cable to link my DSL modem directly to the phone line in the "electricity room" (2oudit el kahraba) on the building ground floor.
Still, I see many posts claiming that it is normal to get disconnected from time to time and this happens with all ISPs in Lebanon. I just don't know what the acceptable frequency of disconnection should be: once per day, once per week ? etc...
Let's hope DSL will be more stable once fiber optics cabling is installed throughout the country.