[Sderby] Modems

[Simon Hales]

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, Sam Styles wrote:

> Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 16:43:13 +0100
> From: Sam Styles <s.styles at lathamarchitects.co.uk>
> Reply-To: South Derby LUG General Mailing List <sderby at mailman.lug.org.uk>
> To: sderby at mailman.lug.org.uk
> Subject: [Sderby] Modems
>
> Hi all,
> My first post to this great list which Ive been reading for months now. Ive
> just recently dumped w**dows and wholey gone to linux. Slackware 10 updated
> with the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3.2 to be precise.
> Ive been having a bit of trouble with my modem, i.e. it didnt work. 3 modems
> later (all out of spare machines, not bought) and Im still offline. I
> understand now why - all this winmodem bother. Ive been looking for drivers
> for the ambient one I have and there arnt any drivers for the 2.6 kernel
> yet. Im planning on getting the two other from home tonight and checking for
> drivers for them (they are both connexant) so fingers crossed.
> Anyway, If im not sucessful I will be looking for a 56k hardware modem and
> wondered if anyone had any suggestions and comments on what they use.
> Internal or external, price is the key. Plus the ability for it to actually
> work!
> Thanks in advance
> Sam
Hi

I can highly recommend US Robotics Sportster modems, internal or external.
There is a Sportster "Winmodem" (and I think they were the first to
actually use this word) which should be avoided but the ordinary hardware
modems are fine.

I have bee using them since I was on a 386 using QMODEM for DOS and having
to dial by typing ATD etc.  You can see pretty much the entire command set
by typing AT$, (and I think AT&$ and ATS$ for extended commands) which is
pretty useful for if you need to manually set modem command lines.  The
output from many commands is also very verbose compared to just about any
other modem I have seen which can be useful for troubleshooting or if you
have too much time on your hands and are just curious about how modems
work underneath the hood:-)  I have also found them to be highly reliable
over many (probably too many...) hours of use, and have fitted 2 to my
works RAS server on the strength of this.

I currently have 2x internal USR 28.8kbps, 1x external USR 33.6kbps and 1x
external USR V92 56kbps modems gathering dust as they are now replaced by
an ADSL router:-)  I am probably going to use one of the external ones for
a dial-in server (where the max speed is only 33.6kbps anyway), so the 56k
one may be spare if they are hard to get nowadays.

Regards

Simon Hales


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