On Sat, 2025-09-13 at 17:25 -0600, home user via users wrote: > Did I get the terminology wrong? > The "phone modem" is not some gadget that I put a phone receiver on, and > then dial in and connect via something like "kermit"(?). Maybe I should > call it a broadband phone-modem? It's an Arris Surfboard modem that has > an additional socket in the back for my land-line phone. My phone > service is VOIP.
The terminology is confusingly misused by service providers and users. ISPs will often call any box a modem, even if it has no modem features. My ISP does that. Strictly speaking the one I have is an ADSL modem with an ethernet and Wi-Fi router, and it also has 4G mobile networking as a backup (well, they intend it as the backup instead of it being the main connection). It's a combination unit of several things. You can connect it to the analogue phone line, and it'll use ADSL to connect. You can connect the WAN side of its router to any other kind of internet source (fibre, satellite, etc), and it'll act as just a router. If it doesn't find an internet connection using either of those methods, it'll try connecting to the mobile phone network as the last resort, but otherwise it ignores it. A modem is something that modulates and demodulates some kind of analogue signal into a digital connection for a computer. That could be audio frequency signals over the old dial-up copper phone line phone system, ADSL using radio frequencies over the old copper phone lines, cable modems using radio frequencies over the cable TV system, or even fibre optics (which still is a kind of modem, dealing with modulated light, though they give it a different name). Even Wi-Fi is a kind of modem technology. If your copper phone line plugs directly into it, a cable-tv coaxial cable plugs into it, if a fibre optic cable plugs directly into it, if it wirelessly connects to the mobile/cell phone network, or if a satellite dish connects *directly* to it (without any intervening boxes), feel confident in calling it a modem. Take away any of those analogue to digital conversion features of the box, and it's just a router (a kind of ethernet hub that has a separation between the world-side and the local-side with rules about communication across that divide - even if you can't configure them, *it* has them). It sits between your computer, and whatever other gadget actually connects you to the internet service provider. If any of those devices allows you to plug an old analogue phone into them for voices calls, it's got a VOIP (voice over IP) feature. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64 (yes, this is the output from uname for this PC when I posted) Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
