18.10 NO CARRIER
This means that the analog sine wave (the carrier) from the other modem isn't present like it should be. If you were already connected, this means that the connection has been lost. There may have been noise on the line or a bad connection. The other modem may have hung up on you for some reason: Perhaps the automatic login process didn't work out OK. Perhaps PPP didn't get started OK. Perhaps a time limit was exceeded.
If you get this error before you get connected, it means that the carrier of the other modem wasn't detected by your modem. This may happen if there is there is no properly working modem on the other end. For example, an answering machine could have picked up your call instead of a modem. NO CARRIER will also happen if the modems fail to negotiate a protocol to use. This can happen if you have an early V.90 modem that first tries to negotiate a high speed X2 or K56flex protocol. These two protocols are obsolete and some ISP servers will drop the connection (hang up) when this happens since they have no understanding of such protocols and don't wait around long enough for the calling modem to fallback to V.90.
If you force your modem to drop the connection by dropping the DTR signal or sending your modem the hangup signal (ATH) you may get this error message. But in this case you (or your software) wanted to drop the connection so there should be no problem. In this case you are only supposed to get NO CARRIER if data was lost. So for most cases of dropping a connection by hangup (or by dropping DTR) you only get an OK message. Your modem dialer program may not even display that to you.
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