Comment 20 for bug 311581

I appreciate the frustrations this can cause, but the situation is open upstream and to have standard dial-up (e.g. serial modem) support added, please make sure you let the upstream developers know it's an important issue on the related bug (see at the top of the report for the NetworkManager project), as well as on the NetworkManager mailing list (see http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager).

I don't think there is a need to further add "me-too"'s to this bug report, it just dilutes the useful implementation details.

As a workaround, I know gnome-ppp isn't installed by default, but pppd/pppconfig is. You can use the following command (in a Terminal), to configure your modem to be used to connect to the internet:

sudo pppconfig

Thanks.