ISP dropping the line instead of busy tone.

[RLEE5]

Greetings All:

Over the last several days the Earthlink dial-up number in Boise (447-0020) has been dropping the line 80-90% of the time during access attempts.
After consulting with several friends we are theorizing that They have set their system to drop the line instead of returning a busy tone. This would have the effect of disabling the auto-redial function on the home users' machine, and giving them (Earthlink), more (false) capacity.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is this a sound theory or are we all being paranoid? Is this even technically do-able?

Thanks
R.Lee

 

[pansophic]

In order to drop the line, they would need to have at least one line open, that could answer the call and then drop it. Since this kind of defeats the objective of doing it only when you are at capacity (you'd be at capacity - 1 at a minimum), it doesn't seem likely. More likely is that they actually have a bad codec in one of their Access Servers. When they get close to capacity, this port will get hit more frequently (because it is nearly always free), and make it seem like they are doing it on purpose.

If they pull any form of statistics on their ports, they will see that they have a VERY high call volume on that port, and a VERY short average duration. That nearly always indicates a hardware problem. If you call them and report the trouble, they'll probably check it out a little faster.

In the mean time, check for another local number (although it may send you to the same CO).


pansophic