One of the strange types of complaints we receive from our customers is "The system was working fine till yesterday, I had shut down the system and it is not booting now". Strange as it may sound the common feature of these support requests included burnt motherboards, non-functional PCI Card slots and sometimes burnt Ethernet cards. One common factor in such cases was that these customers had Asianet Dataline as their internet service.
Asianet's cable line is prone to power surges that could burn your modem, ethernet card and if you are unlucky motherboard, processor and even monitor. The possible reason for this is that they depend a lot on KSEB transmission posts to support their cable infrastructure and they do not have surge protection devices at the customer side of the cables. Whatever be the reason there is a risk of power surges damaging the computer connected through Asianet Dataline.
Asianet themselves confirm this issue by specifically requesting users to not connect through the USB or on-board ethernet card and instead use a PCI ethernet card to connect. Following are some precautionary steps you should be taking to protect your PC if you are an Asianet Dataline subscriber

1. Always connect to Asianet Dataline using a PCI Ethernet card. Spending an additional 200-300 bucks is worth it.
2. DONOT connect to Asianet Dataline using the USB port
3. DONOT connect to Asianet Dataline using the onboard ethernet card (built-in network card)
4. Physically disconnect your Asianet Dataline cable from the modem when you are not using internet.
5. Physically disconnect your Asianet Dataline cable from the modem when there is rain and/or thunder and/or lightning