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marvin431 
One possibility is that your telephone line is physically deteriorating. Squirrels like to chew on cables sometimes, for example. My dial-up got bad, then worse, then my whole phone line quit working, and I had to call the phone company and have them come out to fix it. That's a little risky, since if they did not find a problem on their side of the demark, they would have charged me $85 for the visit.
The symptom of the deteriorating phone line, in my case, was static on the phone line when using my telephone itself. Are you getting static?
It doesn't seem very likely that your modem is faulty, anyway. Evil maybe, but probably not faulty

If you do want to try a new one, the basic Creative Labs model
here is working well for me and I got one for my folks too. Hang in there
