According to the Wall Street Journal, Qwest is launching a new public relations campaign aimed at rebranding the company as a more broadband-centric provider. The company, which lost 259,000 residential phone customers last quarter, wants to lessen the emphasis on Qwest the phone company -- through ads highlighting the company's online backup and other broadband-centric services.

Except outside of ad land, Qwest isn't particularly cutting edge. Qwest's "next-gen" ADSL2+ upgrades (when they're available to consumers) offer downstream speeds up to 20Mbps, but upstream speeds limited to a paltry 896kbps. With no wireless phone division to cross-subsidize revenues, next-gen upgrades are limited -- and Qwest is rumored to be considering a sale of their national long distance fiber network.