Today I will be taking a look at a unique product. It is an External Call Waiting Modem from Actiontec. They produce an Internal version to but I requested the External so I wouldn’t have to open my case again. Actiontec is the first company that I know of that has attempted to produce a modem with these features. In it’s beauty they claim that it allows you to surf the internet freely with one phone-line and never miss a call. I will go much more in-depth on that later. I will also tell you if it can live up to the company’s hype of it. This modem will be best for people who use the internet a lot and only have one phone line. If you have 2 phone lines there is no reason that you would need this modem or if you have a high-speed connection such DSL(Digital Subscriber Line), etc. Now that I have that out of the way I can ease you into the review. Actiontec(at least in my opinion) seems to be very proud of this modem and they think that it will sell well or at least reasonably. They boast the fact that they can give you a high-speed connection(56k) and that they are their only competitors for this particular line of (call-waiting) modem. This would be a great thing if it works for anyone who only has one phone-line. The reason for that is that you can never worry about missing a call when surfing the internet and you don’t have to feel pressured to pay more many every month for an extra phone line. Enough Blabber. Onto how this thing works, or at least how it’s supposed to.

Installation was simple enough. All I had to do was shut down my computer, uninstall my current internal modem and then plug the external one into my serial port. Then I plugged a telephone into the E56kCWM, and the internet line. After that I plugged the power adapter into an outlet in the wall. When I rebooted my machine windows detected my new device and then preceded to install the drivers found on the CD-ROM that comes with the modem. There were no compatibility problems and the modem was detected on COM2. Then I proceeded to configure the modem and dial up to the internet. That conclude my installation section and as you can see I encountered no problems. The manual was adequate and detailed enough. I was able to install the modem by following exactly what it said in the manual. They produced a good and detailed manual and anyone can install this external modem.

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