Dropouts

Dropouts are a major annoyance whilst using the Internet. You will be using the Internet as per normal, and all of a sudden your connection will disappear and it is asking to reconnect.

Dropouts are usually caused by a poor quality phone line or poor quality modem. As a general rule, External modems are more reliable than an Internal Modem. This paticularly applies to areas with poor quality phone lines - An Internal modem will usually be perfectly fine on a good quality line, but on a bad line, an internal modem can cause havoc.

The usual remedy for a poor phone line is to force the modem to connect at a slower, more stable speed. To do this will need to put a string in your modem settings to force it to stay in v.34 mode. On most modems this string will be +ms=v34 or +ms=11.

Shoalnet/Fastrac will never disconnect you from the Internet, ONLY if you are a Silver Pack customer who has been connected for 5 hours continously.

Under good conditions, connection times of over 1 month have been achieved. Shoalnet/Fastrac do not have a policy of disconnecting users to "make room" or "free up lines".