UPDATE: Seems newer versions of this modem may no longer work. Other sites indicate this may be a country code setting or other issue. See end of post, and comments below.

For a long time, I wanted  to be able to run NCID to send caller ID information to my squeezebox, to my MythTV box, to my laptop via growl and NCIDStatusBar, etc – but the hangup was a decent modem.  PCI WinModems are largely useless; I have no desire to run binary blobs even if I happen to find one somewhere that works.  External serial modems are a possibility but it’s another AC adapter brick, more cables, and heck my server doesn’t even have a serial port.

So I was very pleased to find that Conexant has a new usb chipset (CX93010 + CX20548) which implements the USB CDC (Communication Device Class) standard.

I bought the Rosewill RNX-56USB modem from newegg.com, and with a minor patch, it’s all working beautifully. I find it a bit funny that in the age of fiber to the home, there’s finally a usable hardware modem again.

UPDATE: Steve, in comments below, points out:

Rosewill support confirms that recent shipments of the modem do not report CID due to an unknown change at the manufacturing level. They say it is out of their hands as the modem is not actually made by them.”

Well, that is a bummer indeed, although information seems sketchy at this point.  Try making sure you’ve set the proper country code with AT+GCI=<proper code>, for starters.