PDANet not staying connected

[mcoyle]

These are probably the worst conditions in which to use PDAnet, but here's the deal...

I take a commuter train home that travels at about 60 mph. I use PDAnet to tether my MacBookPro. I can't seem to keep a good connection for more than 5 minutes. One fix seems to be to request a new DHCP IP on the MacBook, but a few minutes later, it craps out.

PDAnet's screen shows me as connected, but no data is moving in or out.

Any ideas?

Michael

 

[mcoyle]

Updated Info

Updated Info: During today's train ride I maintained my PDAnet connection for the duration of the ride to work.

Access to web pages and the speed of the connection was intermittent, but at this point it may be due to the cell network and not PDAnet. Here's what I did...

On the recommendation of the folks at PDAnet, I opened a terminal and slowly pinged a server to keep the connection active while I read web pages. In a terminal type:

ping -i 5 <name of web server here, google for example>

Every 5 seconds you'll send a little packet to Google saying HELLO.

This also allows you to monitor the quality of the connection via the returned ping times (often they get as high as 15 seconds!)

Even with the pinging, sometimes the connection would just stop working (web, mail and IM). The only way to get it back was to request a new DHCP lease on the computer. I don't understand why this is. Maybe one of you can explain.

I'll keep reporting what I find over the next few day. Please all any insights.

Michael