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From kent Borg <kentborg@borg.org> on the subject of dialup links
dying mysteriously after a few minutes:

The only time I have done "dialup" from Ubuntu is to do a ppp connection over
my  Sprint  phone  to the internet.  I had a disconnect problem.  Rather than
getting to the bottom of it the old fashioned way  I  did  that  modern  lazy
thing: I asked Google.

The answer, which I didn't bother to understand because I am lazy and it just
worked, was to edit /etc/ppp/options and comment out "lcp-echo-interval 30".