No internet is a bad internet

So we are staying in this internet-free location for another 3 weeks. Given the fact that GPRS connection from "life:)" (Ukrainian Cellular Carrier) is awful even when the phone reports full reception and a missing desire to purchase any 3g equipment I decided to try the old dial-up method I haven’t used since year 2005.

As you may know, nearly all laptops are equipped with so-called “modems”. The thing is most (if not all) of them are “softmodems” basically consisting of simple circuitry to interface with the PSTN line and a sound card which does all modulation-demodulation stuff, sending DTMF tones etc.

My laptop (Acer Aspire 5520) is not an exception. I got Conexant HSF modem. And it turned out that there is a hope to bring this winmodem into a Linux world. A company called Linuxant is providing a driver that lets this hardware beep and whistle as it would under MS Windows family.

I should note that while the driver is freely available it is not completely free for usage. Of course if you are satisfied with the 14400bps limit that is imposed over the free version then you are OK with it. If you want to get your beloved “56K” then you will need to pay for the complete licence ($19.99 at the time of writing).

The installation went smoothly and I got my ALSA modules replaced by the versions that were said to work better with High Definition Audio (HDA) modules. In fact, they were not. After the installation I got a fancy /dev/ttyHSFS0 device with /dev/modem pointing to it. And that modem was responding to AT commands!

It could go off-hook and pulse dial only, no DTMF and modulation-demodulation stuff. Since this was the only thing I needed (hey, I can dial the phone manually :), I played with it a bit and dumped the driver completely.

The next day I borrowed a USB modem ACORP-M56EUSS which, upon connection, claimed to be a Conexant soft modem. I understood that it is a destiny :). This modem could at least dial properly and get connected to the other end of the line. With 14400bps limitation as well. So this driver works. OK, disconnecting the external modem and starting to dig into the internal one…

At the same time I found out that I started missing the sound output. I uninstalled the hsfmodem modules completely and found snd-hda-intel module renamed into something “RENAMEDbyhsfmodem”. I renamed it back. Verified that sound worked. Reinstalled hsfmodem from .deb with precompiled modules without overriding HDA modules and got sound missing again.

But the modem started to work.

ATZ
OK
AT&F                                                                            
OK                                                                              
ATW2                                                                            
OK                                                                              
ATDT5640000                                                                     
CONNECT 14400

P.S. Bought a license, 150₴. Full 56K support.