Update: now the old modem, the one that worked for a while, stopped
working.
Then I remebered that theAlpath cable goes through a machine room
with these huge commercial lights ( like the kind you see lighting
Home Depot, Lowes that take a while to turn on). I shut off the
lights and both modems work now. So the fact that the phone cable
running close to these lights had something to do with it.

Mikepier wrote:
Update: now the old modem, the one that worked for a while, stopped
working.
Then I remebered that theAlpath cable goes through a machine room
with these huge commercial lights ( like the kind you see lighting
Home Depot, Lowes that take a while to turn on). I shut off the
lights and both modems work now. So the fact that the phone cable
running close to these lights had something to do with it.

Can you hang a stick of EMT in the area of the lights, and run the cable
through that? Or maybe reroute the cable? Looks like your original hunch
was right, it was just the wrong suspect causing the interference. If
the lights are on the same mains power transformer can as the modems,
the interference could be coming through on the power side, as well. I
get static on all my am radios that use wall power when neighbor turns
on his damn security light.

aem sends....

On Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:25:58 GMT, aemeijers wrote:

I
get static on all my am radios that use wall power when neighbor turns
on his damn security light.

aem sends....

I had that with my OWN security light, the one the HOA wanted on the
end of a section of townhouses.

First it only happened when the bulb was going bad, and later it was
all night. (Only on the weak AM stations, which I didn't seem to
actually listen to.)

Too high for my extension ladder to reach, when fnally the whole
fixture failed and they removed it, I saw that for some stupid reason
it had been set on ...I forget what they call it, but it's on at
half-brightness all the time, and goes to full brightenss if it sees
something. All I had to do was change the next one to be OFF when
it's off. If it comes on for a few minutes and the AM reception is
bad, that would just notify me there was someone outside or the wind
was blowing, which would be ok.

So look at his light and maybe he needs a new bulb, or maybe it's on
all night at half brightness, and yo can get him to change that.

P&M

I was told that the lights in the machine room are called metal halide
lamps. Not sure what kind of frequency they emit but it looks that is
the source of the problem.