"No answer", to me, as an ISP customer would mean that there is a broken modem somewhere that is not answering the
phone.
Definitely different than "Busy."
The modem return code, unfortunately is often not precise. After dialing, if it gets any voice response, be it some human answering because of mis-dialed, message from the phone company offering to retry when line is free, annoucement of "As of <day>, the area code you called will be change to <XXX>", and finally annoucment of "All circuits are busy, please retry latter" ... all will result in a "no answer" return code as the modem expects and not getting the commencement of the modem hand shake sequence. All such voice reponses have nothing to do broken modem ... and the last case is actually a busy condition that cannot be correctly handled by most modem (the Courier has the capability to return a "voice" return code ... but cannot, for good reason, tell you what is the nature of the voice message). This had been a pain in the rear end to me in my previous project. I will be happy to share with anyone my experience with modems ... but let's take this off line. Best Regards, John Leong --------------------------------------------------------- Bell Labs Research johnleong@research.bell-labs.com 4995 Patrick Henry Dr. Tel: 408-567-4459 Santa Clara, CA 95054 Fax: 408-567-4448