Qwest Doesn't See The Point In FiOS > Amen Mueller!

Amen Mueller!

LOL! Seriously?

reply to JasonD

reply to JasonD
Great so why replace that 100 year old copper with new fiber that will last for 100 years when you can just stagnate with copper for another 50 years.

Typical American attitude....no vision or imagination.

reply to digitalfreak
For a lot of Qwest's markets, I'd say Jason is spot on. The ROI isn't there and for the most part, consumers want to pay less money, more so than they want 50 Mbps service to their home.

reply to JasonD
That is when the cable companies come in and eat your breakfast , bang your wife , and befriend your dog.

They need a future strategy. They will continue to leak customers until they can't keep up maintenance costs , then the systems will slowly fall apart leading to an even bigger exodus.

This guy is a moron if he thinks just because he has a monopoly , that he can't be dethroned. They have to at the very least start building fiber out closer to homes.

As a CEO this guys is a joke , you can still milk copper for money but , at&t has even realized that they need to build fiber further out to the customer. Adding more people to your service footprint can bring in more revenue. I mean really , is this guy surrounded by yes men constantly , no one wants to tell him how it is ? And what will happen once wimax and mobile broadband actually com up to snuff with countries like Japan ?

What people don't understand is that the web is growing leaps and bounds daily. Home spun content , and as much as people hat t piracy , are developing a huge hold on the worlds bandwidth. The new net experience is a nice quad core box sitting on your kids desk , while you and your wife are in the office and on the couch respectively. The kids watching youtube in HD while downloading some HD tv shows or music , your wife reading on a site listening to a little music. You vpned into work working with rather large files.

The new internet is like the old tv , the family will enjoy it , but not together. The needs of the family will exceed 25 meg easily.
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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt......and then it's absolutely friggin' hysterical!"

reply to XBL2009

reply to BosstonesOwn
"That is when the cable companies come in and eat your breakfast , bang your wife , and befriend your dog."

You know, you're right. I swore, swore, swore that I would never leave Qwest for cable, and I just have. Not just because of the higher speeds offered for approximately the same price (after the one year contract expires anyway) but because Qwest's attitude about upgrades and service quality left something to be desired.

It's not just about lack of innovation. As I've said before in other threads, I would have been satisfied for a while on 1.5/896 DSL service. It got the job done for what I needed it to do, and wasn't too terrible in terms of speed. The uptime was usually fantastic. After my phone line got cut a bunch of times, however, I started having massive errors on my line and my connection would only train at 512/896. When I called a technician out last summer to look at the line and see what could be done, after searching for bridge taps and testing various things, he said the only option was to downgrade me to 640/256. "You won't notice," he said. "I won't notice only being able to download at 70kb/s when I used to be able to download at 160kb/s?" That stopped him in his tracks. He obviously knew he was dealing with a customer who wasn't an idiot. I humored him, and let him call Qwest and have them train me at that speed and then bump me back up because it was too slow for my needs, especially on the upstream end. I find it unacceptable after having a product for three and a half years that I'm suddenly told my neighborhood can't support it anymore and they're downgrading anyone who calls in to complain. I'm not the first person I've heard of that that has happened to, either.

After sitting on those speeds for another eight months, hoping that there'd be some miraculous fix, and calling tech support from time to time to find out if there was anything they could do, the cable company finally offered a digital cable/phone/internet package that was too good to pass up. I don't want satellite TV, which is the TV bundle that Qwest pushes. I have three TVs, I don't want to pay extra for receivers on two of them - which is non-negotiable, since there's a small child in the house and the main TV is out of commission at night because it's too close to her room, and then extra for my local channels. The quotes I've gotten from both DirecTV and DishNetwork in the past always ended up being more expensive than cable was, and also forced use of a credit card, which we don't have at the moment. Paying $8/month for services like caller ID was also starting to tick me off. Now we have phone service with voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, three way calling, and long distance for $30/month.

I will keep an eye on Qwest - I haven't given up on them, per se - but they've given me no reason over the past year to show them any sort of loyalty as a customer. There used to a time where technical support was first rate, and they were willing to do anything to fix your problems, but those days are gone.

I definitely agree with your statement that the needs of a family could easily exceed 25 megs in the coming years. Most of the families I know aren't satisfied sharing one computer together. I know I could never share a computer with a spouse, let alone a child. Multiple computers means multiple people using bandwidth at once across the house, and there are plenty of legitimate, bandwidth-sucking services available to necessitate the need for higher speed tiers. For the sake of my suburb, I really hope that Qwest is hoping and waiting to get bought out by someone else. I drool at the thought of FIOS.
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You're watching Sports Night on CSC so stick around...

reply to BosstonesOwn

Right - and not enough large cities to make the investment worthwhile.
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Canada = Hollywood North

reply to John Galt
I might not live there but I have spent the last 8 years of my life out there. Great Barrington 3 Rivers , North Adams, Brush Hollow.

I know rural areas. I enjoyed my satellite tv and charter cable internet. At times i even had DSL. Of course working for one of the biggest employers out there helped , but still.

If qwest does not want to provide , then get the hell out of the way and let another provider or community project build out, instead of fighting it.
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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt......and then it's absolutely friggin' hysterical!"

reply to en102
Then bite the bullet , bring fiber out to a centralized point. Verizon has single handedly cut the cost of fiber in half.

Qwest should be able to as well. You need to see the future not just 5 years out. Copper is not cheap to maintain. Fiber is getting cheaper to maintain every month.

At some point your venture is costing much more to maintain then upgrade.
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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt......and then it's absolutely friggin' hysterical!"

reply to XBL2009
Yea...because no one in America ever innovated or invented anything. Maybe if we had tried harder to build our telephony network we'd have gotten a lower number for a calling prefix

Copper has a good 10 years or so left in it before economies of scale make it extremely viable to gut and replace.

reply to BosstonesOwn

Yup - similarly, AT&T has been sitting on its hands delivering fiber to the node.

For Qwest of any other company:

a. Cost of equipment (fiber, switch gear, infrastructure) - not horrible, some can be written off as upgrades as existing equipment is aging.
b. Cost of actual installation - this is the expensive part

vs.

a. Cost of maintaining existing gear, expanding where needed within a small budget (FTTN, VDSL, ADSL2+)

b. Profit

Qwest, like AT&T/Verizon, etc. want someone to pay for these upgrades, or concessions from govt. to deploy before they'll think about it. Cable typically does better in rural areas due to loop shared node vs. Telcos DSL line limitations.
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Canada = Hollywood North

reply to BosstonesOwn

Eye kant' eh greee mo'!

reply to ztmike

reply to hjc71
Don't be a damn spelling and grammar nazi.

I didn't have spell checker running on my phone when I posted that.
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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt......and then it's absolutely friggin' hysterical!"