Which USB Modem?

Doug.Palmer at csiro.au Doug.Palmer at csiro.au
Wed Dec 18 09:36:15 EST 2002


> The obvious step for you to take is to disconnect the modem from the phone
line 
> everyday before you leave home. If you disconnect it while you are at home
when 
> there is the chance of a storm then consider that there will be always be
a storm 
> when you are not at home - and disconnect. It will saves you heaps of
money in 
> the long run, yes?

Strangely, no. I have a permanent connection and I pay my ISP per megabyte,
rather than per hour. Due to local call costs, I pay ~30c for each dial-up.
I make about 30 calls over a three month period, costing me $9. If I called
up once every day, it would cost me $27. Over a year, that roughly equals
$70 or almost one dead modem. 

In practice, this is not desirable, anyway, since I am running a web server,
mail server, ssh daemon etc from home as well. http://www.charvolant.org

In the meantime, I got a Dynalink 56 USB Pro yesterday, which is a full
hardware modem. Setup was pretty impressive. I usually spend a couple of
hours playing about with new hardware before everything runs smoothly. The
kernel detected it the moment it was plugged in. All I had to do was adjust
the modem device to be /dev/input/ttyACM0. I couldn't quite get it to come
up immediately, so I just rebooted and let kudzu take care of things, but I
think I'd have been able to do it without rebooting if I had taken the
trouble. Less than 15 minutes work. 



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