Review by kucharsk 
UPDATED: 1.8 years ago
member for 8.6 years, 35 visits, last login: 5 days ago
 Louisville,Boulder,CO
 $50 per month
 about 15 days
 Qwest
 "Equipment arrived in a timely manner, great service when running"
 "Tech support is overloaded and is often wrong"
 "Great but you never forget you're dealing with a telco..."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Bottom line:
Called in October, 2000 to see if I could get DSL yet (they had told me previously that I couldn't, but they would call me when I could.)
To my surprise, the customer rep said yes, I could!
I signed up for ADSL but my order was immediately put on hold due to lack of capacity at my CO.
Fast forward to December 2000. My line is provisioned, and the equipment received at my house. I hooked it up and anxiously awaited my activation date.
The date came and went with no service. I called tech support, they said they'd
check the CO.
I got a call the next day saying the DSLAM had been misconfigured, and that I should try again.
Once more, no service.
I called again and the tech walked through things with me and verified their end was sending out signals but they weren't seeing traffic from me. They promised to have a field tech check it out.
Bottom line - the copper in my neighborhood is too thin to support DSL. The field rep said this was "not the first time" they sold DSL into my neighborhood, though they (the field reps) know it doesn't work in my neighborhood.
I called and cancelled and sent back my modem.
End of story, right? Wrong.
This month's phone bill was still screwed up, as Qwest has still not refunded what they charged me for my equipment in the first place (let's ignore they already had my equipment back before the first charge for the equipment appeared.)
The problem seems to be that they use a different company for processing returns that cannot themselves issue account credits but rather have to file paperwork with Qwest to request that they issue the credit, but Qwest argues that they can't issue the credit because they didn't get the equipment back and so have to wait for the form from the place that received the return.
So summary:
* Long provisioning wait
* No service
* No refund for equipment months later...
By the way - the way Qwest's DSL works is to send it over the same copper lines as your POTS, and there are "microfilters" you place on your other phone lines to filter out the DSL signal.
Unfortunately, those filters also wipe out all high frequencies from transmitted voice, so people you call complain you sound like a parent in an animated Peanuts special (Wah wah wah wahhhh...)
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UPDATE July 20, 2001
I've got Qwest DSL and it's GREAT!
Apparently the switch from CAP to DMT RADSL allows them to provide me with service. I have the Cisco 678 baking its way into my desk (it must be at least 130 degrees F on the bottom), but it works great.
The problem? The qwest.net tech support folks are very overloaded and the recording drastically underestimates hold times (it's said 30 minutes for the past two days, with the actual wait being over an hour each time.)
This time, the modem showed up promptly (again) and the service was activated on the proper date, but I didn't receive my "welcome letter" from qwest.net. I called and they "reset" my password (after 90 minutes on hold), but I still couldn't login - the modem kept receiving PAP authentication errors.
(By the way, the long hold times are their own fault; most of their Cisco 675s are being disabled by the "Code Red" virus, despite the bug in the web configuration interface being known for over a year. Why they never had their users upgrade their CBOS I'll never know, but they're suffering for it now...)
Finally, the day after activation day, my "welcome letter" arrived. Despite having been "reset," the password on the letter worked! I was up and flying and don't know how I ever lived without DSL. I'm not sure of the actual speed, but the Cisco claims it's trained at the theoretical maximums of 640 up, 256 down, and I've watched many 300K+ encoded video files and don't have any reason to doubt those figures.
What can I say? Qwest really came through this time, though once again if anything in the process goes wrong you never forget you're dealing with a phone company...
One other cool thing - the NAT and filtering features in the Cisco 678 are good enough that I can return the Netgear router I bought to do the same thing, saving me $80 or so...
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UPDATE January 22, 2008:
I STILL love Qwest. It's been reliable and has been down for more than an hour or two about three times in the past eight years and my Cisco 678 is still rock solid.
The only time I really have issues is when an electrical storm moves through and the modem retrains after each nearby lightning bolt.
However, what IS getting old is paying $49.99/month for 640K. Qwest's own web site says I should only be able to get 256K, either of which is on the border of the definition of "high speed Internet" these days.
Since I doubt Qwest will ever invest in a remote DSLAM for my neighborhood, I'm stuck at 640K forever, and am currently awaiting a Comcast install as a comparison; $63/month for 8M down doesn't seem so bad.
I don't want to leave Qwest, but 640K is way too slow for almost anything in these days of 400M software updates from vendors.
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