Artificial Keepalives

Our servers are set to time out a connection after 30 minutes of inactivity.  The purpose of this is to prevent users from inadvertently tying up a modem when they are not actually using the Internet.  An artificial keepalive is any mechanism whose purpose is to prevent your dialup connection from timing out.

If you pick up your telepone at home, you'll hear a dial tone.  If you don't do anything for a couple of minutes, you will lose the dial tone and your phone will not work until you hang up and try it again.  This is because the phone company cannot dedicate a dial tone to each and every telephone.  If they did that, the switch would have to be about 10 times larger, and you'd be paying about 10 times as much for your phone service.

Exactly the same situation applies with us.  We cannot give you your own personal incoming connection to our server.  We have enough lines so that you never get a busy signal.  One of the ways we maintain that never-busy situation is by disconnecting modems that are not being used.

There are various ways you can get a permanant connection.  For $75/month you can have an un-metered dialup account.  This allows you to keep your dialup connection active 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, idle or not, and we won't ever disconnect it.

We also have high-speed digital access, including ADSL, wireless, and frame relay.   All of these are always-on services which never get disconnected.