Application in background throttle issues

I have an AIR application which periodically does things like:

- Checking data and altering it via HTTPService requests

- Checking things using Timers

- Using NetConnection to communicate between multiple devices

These functionalities are working fine when the application is actively used by the users. However the problems occur when the application is in the background. After 20-30 seconds the HTTPService requests are not executing, the timers are not running and the netconnection is not receiving nor sending any data until the application has been made active again.

I did some tests and also added an enterFrameHandler to trace the frames. I can confirm the enterFrameHandler fires a lot when the application is active and when it becomes inactive it degrades to 4 FPS to 1FPS to 0FPS.

I have set backgroundFrameRate to 60 and frameRate to 60 (although the default backgroundFrameRate of -1 should suffice) but that doesn't prevent the issue either.

This is occurring on Adobe AIR 3.8 with Apache Flex 4.10. Please can anyone help me figure out how to keep a constant frame rate even when the application is in the background? This is a critical feature for my application!