A customer was unable to connect to the net.

He had tried to contact his ISP, and after a while on the phone, they gave up and said its a problem with his computer.

I take a look and quickly find that the ISP had gotten him to reset the netcomm nb5 back to the factory settings (so his username and password were blank).

I added the appropriate details, hit the connect button, and we could browse the net once again.

Just to be sure, I power-cycled the modem. And then it wouldn’t connect…

I connect to the modem, and I see it remembered the user account setting… but it wasn’t connected.

According to the settings, it should connect automatically.

hmmm.

customer has another (slightly different) model netcomm (still an nb5, but a smaller size).

Oddly, it seems to show similar symptoms.

By sheer accident, I discover that the modem seems to connect automatically about 5 or 10 minutes after it is restarted!

In fact, both modems seem to behave like that.

Its possible that they only connect once an attempt is made to access the internet… but I just didn’t have the time to experiment and find the exact cause.

In the future, I’ll just keep an eye out for this problem on other netcomm modems.