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[Varche]

Last year I had awful service problems at the end of summer here in Spain when my Huwaei dongle modem gave up eventually after getting progressively worse. Now my dongle modem from a different company and a different Telco is exhibiting the same symptoms which you could be forgiven for thinking is just the service dropping out or your connection being allocated to a new user.

I am wondering if they are failing due to heat fatigue? I guess most users plug into their laptop and have a session on the net and then disconnect. I tend to use it like ADSL. Switch on desktop in morning and switch off at bedtime. It is on the end of a 5metre USB extn cable(better signal)  and has good air space around it.

What do you think?

[bootie]

Who's the provider Bryan?
We are with Vodaphone.es, they sometimes experience link failure with the towers that are our only link, consequently the service drop right off.
Our is a Huwaei dongle as well, we have it plugged into our wifi transmitter, works OK until bandwidth is all used up for the month then it slows right down. Ours remains plugged in the whole time and have suffered no failure. We are just coming up to the 2 year contract so I expect it to start failing then!!!

What exactly happened to the original dongle in terms of service, did it just seem to not connect or were you connected than lost the signal?

As we are quite remote, when there is a high useage period (school kids getting home) we will get thrown off as the better connections take all the bandwidth available, sometimes not able to get back on for hours, and during the holidays, sometimes it will be days before we can slide into a space!

Not sure if this helps or not mate, just a bit of info from personal experience

Jon

[Kevin Wood]

I doubt it's heat related but there may be other seasonally-related issues giving you problems.

e.g.

More activity from visitors in the area causing network congestion?

More signal attenuation from leaves on the trees?

[CaptainZok]

Would a dose of freezer spray prove it one way or another Kev?

[henryd]

my work USB dongle is on the end of a 3 metre extension lead and is on all day every day without issue,2 years old now

[TheBoy]

Whilst they run warm, my dongles are trouble free, and often on for long periods...

[Martian]

As above really, I've never seen a dongle fail due to thermal related issues although that's not to say it is impossible for thermal failure to occur.

[Varche]

Right that has set my mind at rest over the heat issue.

Our service was with Orange and they were and still are diabolical.

The symptoms were just like the times when the kids come out of school and all start texting and watching Utube etc. In other words shown as connected but no traffic passed. The help desk were useless and suggested that maybe their service wasn't good enough where we lived and to try someone else! Eventually the conceded the modem might be faulty and that was whn the trouble started. Take it to an Orange shop and they will test it and replace it. Sure it tested faulty but the SIm was fine. They then took both items and sent it off for "exchange". Come back in a fortnight. I did that and there was no SIM with it. They had lost it. Shop wasn't interested as they are sales franchises ad Orange wasn't interested.

4 months on and they still haven't found the SIm, they still are billing me and set a credit collection agency onto me.. I have complained through Spanish OFTEL.

What concerned me was the dongle modem for our new faster service with Telefonica started doing the same thing.............

[Martian]

What concerned me was the dongle modem for our new faster service with Telefonica started doing the same thing.............

My first suspicion would lay with bandwidth issues Varche.

I occasionally (although it seems to happen more often now) get the same problem when I have my phone tethered to my laptop, and I also suspect that my service provider (O2) also "traffic shape" based on what device they see connected to their network.
Using an O2 dongle in my living room I quite happily pulled 3.5 Mb/sec without a problem, yet using my phone (Galaxy SII on O2) tethered to the same laptop at the same time of day only yielded download speeds that barely topped 1 Mb/sec.

The only real way you can rule out the hardware is to swap it for another (known good) Telefonica dongle and see what happens.