Internet Keeps Disconnecting

genie

My dial up internet continually disconnects without warning every few minutes. I share the line with my neighbour as the line passes through my garden to a pole and on to the neighbour's house. My neighbour was without a phone line for some time as tree felling brought the line between the pole and their house down. During that time my own line didn’t disconnect but once my neighbour’s line was reconnected last week my own line began to disconnect again. As I need the internet for my work, I can’t have it continually disconnecting. It also crackles when I make phone calls.

I've had Eircom out before and they found water in the line somewhere, not on the line on my or my neighbour's property.

Has anyone else had this problem?

Fogmatic

Yes, frequently (including now; it's rainy here). Our line's noisy anyway (often audibly, so probably always for the internet). It often goes dead in rainy weather. The Eircom engineers do something to the box on our pole and that fixes it - for a while.

Another cause for a similar problem (voice calls cutting out after a few seconds) was discovered by a determined engineer who checked our wall socket. He made some remark to his mate about the original installer that I couldn't quite make out but was definitely uncomplimentary. The wires were badly routed so that the rain got in, so as soon as a connection was started (voice call or internet) it promptly shorted out (he showed us the verdigris etc inside). A new socket (and better installed) solved it, but we still get the problem with the box (which dates from getting the phone in in '92; like yours, the line's since gone on to neighbours).

Another episode of intermittently getting cut off was a h+++ of a job to diagnose, and eventually turned out to be the wrong type of cows (to misquote British Rail). A neighbour's pole, which was leaning over, was an ideal scratching-post for a group of cows. They were only in need of it occasionally, so it took a while to spot. The movement of the pole was putting too much strain on the phone line junctions.

After some of our phone fault reportings, we've seen engineers up various other poles, including some nearly at the exchange (about 6km away). So it could be anywhere!

We've found most of Eircom's engineers-on-the-ground take a pride in it and try hard to solve things (including the cheerful Polish team we had last time). I guess all one can do is keep on reporting the faults - they're probably as keen as we are to find the root cause of recurring problems.

Is your connection speed ok, by the way? I only realised fairly recently that mine's abysmal (mostly 9.6kbps, sometimes 12, somtimes 7.2). If you're getting less than 28kbps (if I remember right), you might be interested in a thread elsewhere about complaining to Eircom, given the line rental we have to cough up (have to go now, but could link to it next time).