[forrester]

I get the following message regularly while playing solitaire, but never when competing in a tournament. Any thoughts? I am on a PC using Firefox.

Service unavailable. Please refresh page or try again later.

Thanks.

[pescetom]

gbb483, on 2020-June-21, 00:23, said:

I have a tablet with both WiFi (BT) and 3G (EE). I get disconnected quite often with BT, but rarely if at all with EE. I now switch the WiFi off whilst using BBO and my disconnection problems are beginning to recede. Its annoying, because I would prefer to use my Windows 10 laptop with V3, but that's limited to WiFi, and the tablet is an old one on which the Table Options for Teams don't work properly.

I may try using the tablet as a hot-spot for the laptop, but I'm not sure how much extra data W10 will try and pump down it.

It would be useful if all the clients could warn the user when there were connection issues - a 'beach balling' cursor perhaps?

And for the technically minded - the BT connection is 15M fibre and I have the house served with powerline devices which give me 200M between the devices and the router, with WiFi ports at strategic locations.

The only hope I can give you is that W10 does not pump much superfluous data through a hot-spot, it recognises a metered network and so does One-drive.
Yes BBO does seem vulnerable to WiFi disconnects even with a good network and yes nobody has yet denied that the client does not know when there are connection issues after one is logged in.

[gbb483]

Would plugging my laptop directly into the powerline device solve the disconnection problems? - I might try that.

[jojic]

We have the same issue with both newer ipad and Macbook Pro.
Not sure "where" the problem is
Our connection speed (Wifi) is around 300 Mbps and that should not be the issue. It seems to me BBO is terminating the game while playing pretty frequently. Is there a way to set the connection time to 1 hour?

[gbb483]

Its not the WiFi, I get the same reaction when using a wired connection.

The problem is a background handshake between the client (your platform) and the server (them). The ISPs are slugging it, and the server decides you've gone away. It depends on your ISP. I find using the 3G connection of a tablet resolves the issues, and my disconnection performance figure has finally started to climb back up.

[oni06]

I have the same problems mentioned by others in this post!

What I have not seen is a solution to resolving the problem. Am I missing something?

[barmar]

oni06, on 2020-August-06, 07:26, said:

I have the same problems mentioned by others in this post!

What I have not seen is a solution to resolving the problem. Am I missing something?

No, you aren't missing anything. It's probably a problem with your ISP's connection to our ISP, and there's not much either of us can do about it. That's life on the Internet.

[gbb483]

barmar, on 2020-August-06, 14:45, said:

No, you aren't missing anything. It's probably a problem with your ISP's connection to our ISP, and there's not much either of us can do about it. That's life on the Internet.

Not true. If you know the source of the problem you can derive algorithms to compensate for it. It just takes a bit of motivation.

[88Watcher]

barmar, on 2020-August-06, 14:45, said:

No, you aren't missing anything. It's probably a problem with your ISP's connection to our ISP, and there's not much either of us can do about it. That's life on the Internet.

[88Watcher]

So why would so many different ISP have this issue with BBO's ISP? The only common factor with this problem seems to be BBO.

[Marlow7]

Having decided it was worth checking if other BBO members had the same problem, I see they do.
BBO woks fine on our laptop and tablet, but constantly loses connection on the hard wired (with wifi back up)PC.
BBO alert blames poor internet, which is nonsense. If BBO has a problem with PC's they should say so.

[prabodhs]

barmar, on 2019-June-01, 17:55, said:

The only thing I can think of is that you have a buggy modem or router, and it's somehow sensitive to some data pattern that's common in the BBO communications. There really isn't anything we can do about this.

This isn't impossible. Many years ago I worked for an ISP, and one of our customers complained that when they tried do a file transfer it always got stuck at the same place. It turned out to be a bad modem, and when they replaced it everything was fine.

[prabodhs]

There is nothing wrong with our modems or routers. Things were working just fine until the new version started bring used, we log on and get kicked out asking us to log in again. This happens mutliple times. Please fix it.

[bbutcher85]

barmar, on 2019-June-01, 17:55, said:

The only thing I can think of is that you have a buggy modem or router, and it's somehow sensitive to some data pattern that's common in the BBO communications. There really isn't anything we can do about this.

This isn't impossible. Many years ago I worked for an ISP, and one of our customers complained that when they tried do a file transfer it always got stuck at the same place. It turned out to be a bad modem, and when they replaced it everything was fine.

My regular partner is playing ACBL tournaments on a laptop PC (not apple) running Windows 7 64 bit with the latest version of Google Chrome (V 87.0.4280.141) and V3 (HTML version) of BBO software. Her laptop is set up to never sleep, never hibernate, never turn off the disks, and is plugged into the AC power. She and I are in the same house with the same internet connection, but play in different rooms to be ethical. She experiences numerous problems with what appear to be disconnects, but they are not real disconnects. Her screen just fails to update when a bid is made or a card is played by me or an opponent. She does not see the play or bid for some reason. This sometimes happens several times in one hand, other times maybe 5-6 times during an 18 board match. This cause breaks in tempo and sometimes running out of time since there is no indication of a problem, it just appears to her to be a slow player.

When I check the people box she is still online, but the only way to correct the problem seems to be her logging off and back on. I am playing on the same high speed internet using a Windows 7 32 bit desktop PC with V3 BBO software, and I almost never have a connection problem. I sometimes play on my ancient laptop computer running Windows XP with V2 software and again almost never have a problem with disconnects. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, but buying a new computer is not a viable option.

[smerriman]

Are you playing on wifi? Would recommend she plugs directly into the router as a comparison; if that fixes it, then she has an intermittent wifi connection, either caused by location within your house, or simply the laptop's adapter.

[arnoh]

We have also experienced frequent disconnections. My wife and I play weekly in a teams event on bridgebase. I never get disconnected. She does, several time a night. The difference is that I have a direct ethernet connection to our router, she's connected upstairs via powerline (over the mains wiring). Yesterday she connected her PC to the router using a long ethernet cable instead of powerline. There were no disconnections.

Her normal connection over powerline is good (55Mbps). There are no problems watching HD video. However we think that occasionally one of the powerline units is temporarily unresponsive and that causes a disconnection to the bridgebase server. It can't be unresponsive for more than a few seconds, because the disconnections happen in the middle of a game.

This behaviour would be explained if the bridgebase server does a continual handshake and if it doesn't get an immediate response, summarily disconnects the user.

Does bridgebase use a handshake mechanism like this?

[mycroft]

Interesting - we have exactly the same issue, including connection over powerline. One thing - the computer has a wifi setup as well. Could it be the switch from very short powerline drop to wifi and back that is doing this?

[barmar]

One of my regular partners has frequent disconnects while we're playing a tourney, and her son discovered that her ISP frequently changes her IP, sometimes in the middle of a session. She has to reboot her PC to reconnect (I suspect there's something she could do more quickly in the Network control panel, but I'm not very savvy in MS Windows use).

[jazou]

I get lot of disconnections when playing BBO with "direct" (CPL) ethernet link on my tower, and no one more when switching to Wi-Fi. Only BBO is enhanced with a wifi connection. That why I added a wifi key on my PC tower. The rest of my applications dont need wifi connection to work properly. Could it be a question of a larger buffer in the wifi road, and BBO less tolerant with micro cuts?

[DaveRolyat]

I had exactly this problem - BBO dropping me from tournaments every 20-30mins and no other internet issues.

I am using a DLink Powerline Adapter from my router to my PC and this seemed to have a role in the problem, because if I used a long Ethernet cable instead, it was fine.

To solve it I had to use a script that starts on my PC at login and pings the router continually.

Of course I have no idea why this works, or why it only affects BBO.

Instructions from:

https://www.youtube....h?v=Al3kwmfzsOQ