[andych]

Recently could not connect to BBO (both BBOWIN, and BBO Flash). Both keep on connection lost. Other connections (e.g. browsing, email of non BBO sites) are fine. Friends using same ISP get similar problem.

Appears to be ISP problem. Any info I could provide if writing to the ISP for checking.

[inquiry]

Could be a DNS service error (sorry if that is not the correct term).

Every now and again, somewhere out on the internet, the various domain name servers that convert things like www.bridgebase.com to 194.33.44.33 get out of wack. By that I mean, they no longer point to the correct numerical address.

I have found that in a few hours, these things fix themselves, but if this is what is happening and you want to play NOW, that is not useful. When that happens for normal webpages, you can type in something like http://70.84.167.229 which will take you to the website that the DNS servers have linked to those four numbers.

In fact, http://70.84.167.229 will bring you to a bridgebase online site where you can click a link and find this page. About once every year or two my computer will not be able to find this forum (same problem as I think you are describing, but not sure). When that happen, I type that link in and I am magically transported here.

Sadly, I am not aware of a way you can get flash to find the bbo server that way (the bbo server web address can be found in the ini file, but not sure that will help you with flash).

[andych]

Thanks Ben. My situation seems a bit different ....
I could browse the bbo home page, posting in forum, all other internet activities...
but just that i could not play bbo, no matter bbo win or bbo flash. It keeps on losing connection ....

[hotShot]

try to enter to a command prompt:

nslookup www.bridgebase.com

This should give you the IP-number, if the DNS-Service is working.
If the DNS is not the problem, try:

tracetr www.bridgebase.com

You'll get some cryptic output where your data are sent.
Today it took 20 steps to get my data there, if you data get stuck somewhere, you can see where they get stuck.

[uday]

The windows version of BBO needs to maintain a persistent TCP connection on port 9999 from your PC to bbo.bridgebase.com. Any time this conn is disrupted, you'll be booted. Maybe your ISP can look at the quality of their connection to bbo.bridgebase.com..

[mycroft]

check to see if that port is firewalled off, too. The ISP might think it isn't important, or your proxy may just deny it out of hand (for security reasons - who uses anything but 80(80) nowadays?)

That's typically an "at work" issue, rather than an ISP issue, but it's worth checking.

[keylime]

Also, if you have DSL, you'll want to make sure that the router is dialing out at 30 or 60 second intervals per your ISP. Sometimes that will cause flaky connections.