Not a stupid question. Here is my thoughts on what is happening. Most of the ISP's are changing to digital instead of real modems. The digital modems think they are USR's. USR modems don't always like to talk to the bargain modem brands.
Two things I have done recently. Try to get the user to add a %G0 to the command string. This tells many modems to not renegotiate the rates. There settings for their modems may vary unfortunately but most have functions like this. I have also disabled MNP5 compression on my server modems. It slows down the transfers of compressed files for many people, I think the command is %C2 on many modems. To be sure all of us may have to learn a bit more about the Hayes command set than we wanted to.
Hopefully those two ideas will give you a clue.
One other thing I might mention is that if the user has a lot of construction nearby they may have picked up a lot of noise in their lines. They might get the phone company to check the signal to the house. A construction crew almost a mile away bit one of our main connections and noise was giving me real greif a while back! They also might check their internal lines to make sure they are getting good connections from the box to the inside. I used to have trouble when it rained until I figure out that my box internals were getting wet. I cleaned out the insect nests and sealed the box up a bit better than the phone company leaves it.
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