Thanks for all your suggestions. A few seemed promising but none worked. I was there yesterday and had a play with minicom and kppp and we did get it to connect and start ppp but it was very weird. Here's what happens. In minicom you get: atdt086733444 ... login: username password:<password> now I'd expect to see something like ~(&*%$%*()&)&*%$&*%^ but nothing happens, it's as if the username/password is wrong, but it isn't. The ppp log also indicates that ppp is not starting when dialing with kppp. Here's the weird thing: in kppp we put a Expect ~ / Send <nothing> in the chat script because that's what the howto said to do if it looks like ppp is taking a while to start up on the server. No go. Then we took off the Send <nothing> and just had Expect <any old string>. This caused the chat script to time out waiting for the string and redial. On the second try it connects OK. If the connection is stopped and you try to reconnect then it does the same thing ie dials a second time and connects on the 2nd try. The other puzzling thing is that it used to work fine and as far we know nothing had been changed. He currently has an internal Intel ham modem and I'm wondering if there is something going on with that, like an intermittant hardware failure. The next thing we are going try is an external modem. Any more ideas? g -- Glenn Ramsey <glenn(a)componic.co.nz> 07 8627077 http://www.componic.co.nz