If you sometimes experience that your mobile broadband connection is dropped and you therefore have to connect again in your mobile broadband connection client (such as 3Connect), you might think that it is caused by a bad network connection. Although that sometimes might be the case, you could also be experiencing a problem in a whole different area.

The drop in connection can instead be caused by the power management on your computer (experienced on Windows XP computers). You see, when the power management on your computer thinks that you're not using a USB port, it might turn off the USB port to save power. Very clever in many cases. However, from the perspective of mobile broadband the power management can have a negative effect. Sometimes, it seems, the power management misinterpret whether the USB port is used on not. As a result, the power management might decide to turn off the USB port on which mobile broadband dongles and sticks are connected and running perfectly fine.

As a user, you would experience that the connection to the Internet is lost and that you have to re-connect. And of course you would naturally conclude that it is because of bad mobile network reception when it is actually not.

Fortunately, it's possible to turn off the power save on USB ports. This means that you will not be harvesting the positive effects of power saving on the USB ports, but I would say that it is worth the sacrifice. Here's what you do to turn it off (in Windows XP, it should be possible in Vista as well):

Go to: Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager -> Universal Serial Bus -> Right click on USB Root Hub -> Power Management

Remove the check at "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power". Repeat for all USB Root Hubs.

That's all for now! Send me a comment below, if this helps your connections problems, no? :-)