I had a new usr 288 get zapped by lightning in the fall of '95.  sent 
it back to USR... they sent me a replacement- six weeks later.  Prior 
to this, I had always bought the cheapest modems I could find, and at 
one time or another since '84 have had Zoom, Best, and am currently on 
a generic 336 which has a TI chipset... none of which performed any  
worse than the USR. 
 
BTW: the typical surge sucker, either PC or modem types, uses a MOV to 
shunt dangerous spikes to ground.  The Metal Oxide Varistor chosen for 
this type of job us usually @130 VRMS AC. On the telco line, the RING 
signal is @90 vac, so the phone line type aint all that differnt.  The 
MOV has a sort of "half-life" characteristic in that every couple of  
years, the voltage at which it will shunt goes up by maybe 50%. 
 
So, if you don't remember when you bought your surge sucker, throw it 
out and get a new one... unless it's a "ZERO-SURGE", which don't use 
MOVs but uses inductive clamping.  If yours weighs a few pounds, then 
it likely has some kind of heavy transformer, and the hysteresis, or 
magnetic field lag, performs the spike suppression. 
 
... OFFLINE 1.50  "Pessimist= an optimist in recovery"
--- WtrGate+ 0.93.PRE9-o beta sn 26
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