Telephone Network Problem

[NewbieTech]

I work for a national organisation in Canada which has field staff who have to dial-in occasionally with their laptops. Unfortunately some of our staff are unable to dial-in and it seems located to one geographic location and to be an intermitent problem. All of our staff have the same set-up and the telephone company doesn't believe & can't find any problems with their network.

Anyone have a clue as to what else I could investigate?:???:

[suemarkp]

This is really a rather broad question. If you can call the phones and get a modem tone, I would think the phone company is not responsible (can you hear the phone line while the laptop connects. If not, call the same number with a voice phone immediately after to see if it answers). There could be a configuration issue -- will the dial up connections auto baud or are they set at a fixed baud rate (this question applies to both the laptop modem and the far end modems). Its possible you have noise on the line and you won't be able to get over a 20 kbps conection. If you've hard set things to 26K or 48K, they may not work.

If none of this works, you need to look at the modem otuput to see if it is complaining about something. You may need to put it into a verbose mode to get something meaningful from it. I don't know how you'd do that, as it is application and driver specific.