Home Highway: USB Digital Access TA Installation Issues

I hope someone can help me with this, as BT aren't being bags of use.
I am not terribly familiar myself with ISDN.

I have a client who lives on one of these estates in Milton Keynes to
which they laid fibre all the way to the end of the street, but copper
to each household. As a consequence he can't get ADSL and BT have sold
him Home Hardway and a BTconnect account. He has a "BT Digital Access
USB" box on the wall and is connected to it via USB.

It was working fine until a few days ago, however when I first visited
yesterday the ISDN Test application installed by the BT driver
software was failing with a red unhappy face. This has been resolved
by uninstalling & reinstalling the drivers, however during the
reinstall I get an error message saying "SetupDiRegisterDeviceInfo
(FHLP-COMM-PORT) failed (code = 13)".

It seems that the BT Digital Access USB device allocates itself an
empty COM port during installation that one sets up dial-up networking
using the modem on that COM port. But it does not seem to be able to
do this.

A member of the BT support staff was fairly helpful & talked me
through reinstalling drivers, but he said he'd never encountered this
issue before. An IDSN administration icon is installed in Control
Panel by the driver installation, and we tried allocating COM ports to
the BTDA TA manually, but I received the "SetupDiRegisterDeviceInfo
failed (code = 13)" error each time.

I have tried reinstalling the drivers with the USB cable unplugged,
downloading & installing newer drivers, updating the o/s to Service
Pack 4 (it's a Windows 2000 Pro box) and pulling my hair out, all to
no avail. If anyone else has experienced this problem I would be very
keen to hear how it was resolved.

I have cross-posted this to a couple of ISP-specific ISDN newsgroups,
and I hope posters there will forgive this intrusion - I don't believe
the issue is related to the ISP, so perhaps someone with the same ISDN
hardware may be able to advise.

Many thanks in advance for any replies,

Stroller.

On 19 Apr 2004 10:28:59 -0700, Stroller wrote:

> As a consequence he can't get ADSL and BT have sold him Home Hardway
> and a BTconnect account. He has a "BT Digital Access USB" box on the
> wall and is connected to it via USB.

A google on USB and BT Highway will pull up lots of tales of woe...

Dump the USB connection and get a proper ISDN card. Check that the
Highway Box does have a couple of RJ45 sockets (probably with blue
shutters), I've not heard that BT have produced a Highway box without
'em but...

--
Cheers (E-Mail Removed)
Dave. pam is missing e-mail

"Dave Liquorice" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) ll.com...
> On 19 Apr 2004 10:28:59 -0700, Stroller wrote:
>
> > As a consequence he can't get ADSL and BT have sold him Home Hardway
> > and a BTconnect account. He has a "BT Digital Access USB" box on the
> > wall and is connected to it via USB.
>
> A google on USB and BT Highway will pull up lots of tales of woe...
>
> Dump the USB connection and get a proper ISDN card. Check that the
> Highway Box does have a couple of RJ45 sockets (probably with blue
> shutters), I've not heard that BT have produced a Highway box without
> 'em but...

Seconded. It sounds as if a clean installation of Win2k would probably solve
it, but that's a lot of hassle with no guarantee of success. A cheap PCI
card such as the Asuscom (About £25 from www.solwise.co.uk) would be more
likely to solve the problem. It worked for my brother when he had a similar
problem. BT actually sent him a free Speedway card but that didn't in fact
work (neither did a Win XP reinstall).


--
Phil McKerracher
www.mckerracher.org

"Phil McKerracher" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>
>"Dave Liquorice" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
>news:(E-Mail Removed) ill.com...
>> On 19 Apr 2004 10:28:59 -0700, Stroller wrote:
>>
>> > As a consequence he can't get ADSL and BT have sold him Home Hardway
>> > and a BTconnect account. He has a "BT Digital Access USB" box on the
>> > wall and is connected to it via USB.
>>
>> A google on USB and BT Highway will pull up lots of tales of woe...
>>
>> Dump the USB connection and get a proper ISDN card. Check that the
>> Highway Box does have a couple of RJ45 sockets (probably with blue
>> shutters), I've not heard that BT have produced a Highway box without
>> 'em but...
>
>Seconded. It sounds as if a clean installation of Win2k would probably solve
>it, but that's a lot of hassle with no guarantee of success. A cheap PCI
>card such as the Asuscom (About £25 from www.solwise.co.uk) would be more
>likely to solve the problem. It worked for my brother when he had a similar
>problem. BT actually sent him a free Speedway card but that didn't in fact
>work (neither did a Win XP reinstall).

I concur. I tried using the HH USB but had problems with 'hesitations' when
web browsing and poor ping times in online games. I switched to an Asuscom
from Solwise and all was as smooth as silk.

Richard.
--
Richard P. Scott, Lincoln, England.
news at artofwar gotadsl co uk

"Richard P. Scott" <news@127.0.0.1> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> "Phil McKerracher" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
>
> I concur. I tried using the HH USB but had problems with 'hesitations'
when
> web browsing and poor ping times in online games. I switched to an
Asuscom
> from Solwise and all was as smooth as silk.
>
> Richard.
> --

Agreed. The Asuscom modem from Solwise is the recommended way to go,
otherwise you could spend many more hours trying to get this sorted. I've
found Solwise have a pretty good returns policy too - just in the (unlikely)
case the new card doesn't fix the problem.

SLP

"SLP" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:c65ujj$ele$(E-Mail Removed)...
>
> "Richard P. Scott" <news@127.0.0.1> wrote in message
> news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> >
> > I concur. I tried using the HH USB but had problems with 'hesitations'
when
> > web browsing and poor ping times in online games. I switched to an
Asuscom
> > from Solwise and all was as smooth as silk.
>
> Agreed. The Asuscom modem from Solwise is the recommended way to go,
> otherwise you could spend many more hours trying to get this sorted. I've
> found Solwise have a pretty good returns policy too - just in the
(unlikely)
> case the new card doesn't fix the problem.

Unless it's a laptop, of course. :-)


--
Phil McKerracher
www.mckerracher.org