. : : Valar Morghulis : : .

The Strange UT Starcom Modem

I haven’t been online for a while because I couldn’t connect. I thought Airtel might be having a problem but when the modem consistently didn’t connect for two whole days I started troubleshooting. It turned out to be the same old modem problem again. UT Starcom ADSL modems are really odd.

I’d like you to read this post at Arun’s blog first: The Curious Incident Of The ‘Modem’ In The Night-Time

My setup is like this. The phone line plugs into the splitter and I take a line out from the splitter which goes into the modem. The other plug meant for the phone is left alone since I don’t use the Airtel line.

I had a problem with the modem not connecting about a year ago and after a lot of experimentation I found that it connects when there is a phone plugged into the splitter’s phone socket. After even more experimentation I found out that it connects even if there was a phone wire plugged into the socket with nothing at the other end! Weird, right? Anyway that problem seemed to disappear sometime later.

Next, my modem developed power supply problems. The LEDs flickered slightly and the LAN connection kept dropping. I found out that pressing the power button is a specific way powered up the modem correctly. Arun also suggested sticking a piece of thin cardboard or plastic in the power button’s side so that it was held in place at the correct way. I solved this problem by turning on the modem correctly and then not using the power button after that. I left it powered on to start when the CPU was powered on.

A few days ago my ethernet card started dropping the connection and I kept getting a number of BSODs. Then one day the card stopped working completely. I went and got myself a new card since none of Ragha’s Zebronics cards were detecting automatically in XP. (No George, they wouldn’t have been detected in Ubuntu either. It’s some local shit.) The new card had a Realtek chipset and was detected as a Realtek card but cost Rs. 240 which is pretty expensive for an ethernet card.

Now the new card was having trouble connecting too and it turns out to be the same problem. Plugging in the phone makes the modem connect properly. Why does that work? Arun suggests (in his blog post I linked to initially) that it might be a problem in the Airtel lines. But my modem was working fine till now. Odd. Very very odd. But then, computer hardware is odd. Once my Windows XP booted as far as the logon screen and then the screen went blank and the logon screen wasn’t loading. I cleaned the CPU up and rebooted and it worked. Explain that.

Comments suggesting I use Linux or a Mac will be ridiculed. I give you fair warning.