Re: Communicating with USB Modem

[Phil Requirements <simultaneous@comcast.net>]

On 2010-10-09 19:26:42 -0400, Hal Vaughan wrote:
> On Oct 9, 2010, at 6:49 PM, Camaleón wrote:
[big snip]
> > O.k. I also think geting an USB modem to work should just be plug and 
> > play and no needing to mess with drivers at all. But it could worst: 
> > there are some embedded modems (those you can find in notebooks) that 
> > lack of any driver and they render completely useless.
> 
> Yes, that's true.  And, unfortunately, I had information indicating
> that any USB modem would be similar to RS-232 in that it'd be
> plug-n-play.  That's not so.  And, while I'm looking at embedded
> computers (right now I'm waiting to see if the new Soekris Net-6501
> will do well for me), at least the modems aren't embedded!  And if I
> do use Soekris, they have a serial port -- you HAVE to use as a
> terminal during setup, so once I get the original image created and
> working, I can copy it to an image file and easily install it on
> flash cards and just insert it, without using the serial port on
> each one.  And when they're deployed, I may be able to use it for an
> RS-232 modem, but I'm not committing to that yet.
> 

I had an external USB modem that was initially very gratifying, to
use with a computer that had no serial port. I plugged it in, the
system found it, and I was online in minutes. No external drivers.
It was a very nice experience after having spent many hours trying
to get drivers to work for WinModem cards.

The one I used was US Robotics, but I can't lay my hand on it right
this minute to say the product number.

I did have some problems with this modem over time. The main thing
I remember is it would get moved from /dev/ttyUSB0 to /dev/ttyUSB1
occasionally. Or sometimes when the machine was booted the device
wouldn't get established. I don't know if these were problems with
the modem or my system.

I wanted to point out that the modem I had initially seemed very good
because of how easy installation was. But that's not the whole story.
And that there are some plug and play USB modems out there.