Periodically, the question arises, "why do I get knocked off-line when I have an unlimited account?"
This is a valid question and we feel our answer is equally valid. IDMI.Net has a policy regarding involuntary session disconnects. Our equipment will automatically disconnect a user when one of the following situations occur:
15 minutes passes with no activity.
The reason for this disconnection is, if a user unintentionally stays connected and leaves the computer, they won't be subject to huge long distance bills if they don't have a local connection. It also Frees up our modems so that others can connect.
Five Hours of Continuous Usage
IDMI.Net has a policy against line camping. Line camping is the activity where a user stays connected to the network even though there is no actual usage occurring. This is usually accomplished by the camper running a program that causes some phony activity to make the server think that real activity is occurring. Typically the offending user has a program "force" activity at about 10 minute intervals. This keeps it under the 15 minute no activity disconnect as described above. Very few users stay connected more than 2 hours per session. In order to prevent line camping, our equipment auto-disconnects all dial-up, non-dedicated users at 5 hours regardless of their activity.
TIPS:
If you know you are going to download a large file, disconnect and reconnect before you start the download. That will open a fresh 5 hour window. If five hours isn't enough, you should consider purchasing a faster modem. Otherwise, you can contact support@idmi.net and we'll download the file for you and put it on our FTP servers or arrange for you to pick up the file on a ZIP disk or some other media.
