Are your modem drivers malfunctioning or mangled?

Drivers.biz feels for you! When your modem won't work, you can't connect! We've been seeing people complaining recently about problems with a lot of modem or chipset brands: Lucent modem drivers, PCTEL, Rockwell, and Conexant being the main suspects.

Today people are tired of the Internet crawling along at a snail's pace--they want more speed! Your actual modem hardware is part of the solution, but the other part is the modem's device drivers. These can affect the speed of the connection, and new drivers are released fairly often. So, many surfers want to get rid of old drivers, and update--especially if you are having connection problems, stability problems, or slower speeds than you should be getting.

Common errors:

• The modem won't initialize
• Dropped connections
• Modem doesn't respond to commands
• The modem gives a very long or endless "handshake" when connecting

Perhaps you have a new operating system (OS), or have changed some of your hardware. Most of the time, you need to install a new modem driver.

Another factor contributing to the confusion is that many vendors refer to the .inf file as a modem driver, when in fact the .inf is a text file that contains the proper initialization strings and return codes for the modem.

Need a solution?

First of all, keep in mind that the idea of a 56k modem achieving speeds of 56,000 bits/second is generally a myth. You cannot really get this speed, and should consider that any speed over 33,600 is a 56k connection.

Secondly, if you have a modem made by Lucent, Conexant, Rockwell, PCTEL, or Intel, you really don't! They are manufacturers of some of the internal "guts" of the modem, the chipset, but not the modem itself. They sell their chipsets to people who actually manufacture (and support!) modems. In fact, Conexant now owns Rockwell and PCTEL, too.

Here are some of the top chipset creators (not modem manufacturers), for more advanced users:

• Agere Systems
• Alcatel Microelectronics
• Ambient Technologies
• Conexant Systems
• ESS Technology
• Intel
• Lucent
• Motorola
• PC-TEL
• Rockwell
• Smart Link
• TOPIC Semiconductor
• Zydas Technology

Who manufactured your modem?

One way to discover who built your modem is to go to your Control Panel, and click on "System." Then click the "Device Manager" tab, and look down the list for "Modem." If you click the plus sign (+) beside "Modems" you will see your modem listed.

But the most accurate way to find out the manufacturer of your modem is to look on it for an FCC ID#. Then go to the FCC ID help site and enter the number in the proper field. This will give you the name of the manufacturer. Then visit the manufacturer's site using the Drivers.biz list at the top of this page's right column.