RH 8.1 beta supports winmodems
 

I tried the new Red Hat Beta (phoebe) on my laptop and it set up my winmodem perfectly without any thinking on my part.

I've seen quite a few winmodem related posts so I thought I'd pass this along.

The laptop is a few years old, so your mileage may vary on your new Pentium4 7.5GHz laptop. :)