Day four, and I still don’t have my DSL restored.
After several unfulfilled assurances by phone and email, I called Qwest this morning fairly resigned, and the tech support rep I reached wasn’t much more enthusiastic. He didn’t even try to reset my line or reprogram my modem. He just insisted that it was too old and slow to deliver the 7 Mbps service it had delivered reliably up until the moment Qwest fucked with my line Monday morning, and rather than wasting anymore time for either of us, he offered to send me a new one, free of cost.
That means I won’t be back up until tomorrow, or possibly Monday. Assuming the new modem works. But at least that’s better than the status quo, so I accepted.
The main reason I refused to upgrade to 12 Mbps was that I didn’t feel like dealing with the support hassle, and potentially being left without service for a day or more. I guess Qwest showed me.
I opened a home office ten years ago and Quest sent and billed me for two phones. They insisted that I had ordered the phones and that I couldn’t return them. Then it turned out they didn’t work with the Quest system – even the message light didn’t work. Quest then told me they weren’t responsible for the malfunctioning phones and that I had to contact the manufacturer of the phones and take it up with them. I ended up giving the damned phones to Goodwill.
Good luck with Quest, Goldy.
Well the plus side is you probably need to get out more Goldy so enjoy your few days of working from cafes and bars.
As for the rest, you might as well try Clearwire I doubt they could be any worse than Qwest.
As for me I’m on a Speakeasy (aka Best Buy) DSL running on a leased Qwest wire. Not sure who the CLEC is but we haven’t had to deal with Qwest at all.
Goldy,
My stepson, who works for Comcast, in sales, would just love to talk to you.
File a Consumer Protection Complaint with the AG and make Quest respond. When your DSL is back, you can do it online.
I still recommend Comcast Internet. In Edmonds, the service is around $50 and has been flawless. I just checked and my upload speed is 1.63 mB and my download speed is 1.45 mB for standard residential service.
Our office just moved to Comcast Business Class for the extra speed.
http://speakeasy.net/speedtest/
Download Speed: 22961 kbps (2870.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 9137 kbps (1142.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Before that we used Drizzle, who I still highly recommend. Our connection was over Qworst DSL lines, but you got to call Drizzle to handle any issues. And they know what they are doing.
I know it is popular to hate on Comcast. But as someone who works from home and relies desperately on Comcast’s consistency of connectivity, I can’t imagine going with anybody else.
@6 Comcast has sent over 1,000 mailers to my home over the last 10 years. Yesterday, a Comcast salesperson rang my doorbell, which is located approximately 12 inches from the “No Soliciting” sign pasted to the door. When Mrs. Rabbit pointed out the sign to him, he said he “wasn’t soliciting.” Comcast is one of this area’s worst two practitioners of harassment marketing, in which the prospective customer is relentlessly hounded until he caves in and buys the product just to get the pestering salespeople off his back. (The other is the Seattle Times.) I HATE that company! And one of these days, I’m going to figure out a way to get back at them. Buy their service? Fuggitaboutit! I will NEVER be a Comcast customer.
goldy, time to nationalize all broadband; give us Cuban speeds
@ 4, @ 5: Awfully slow speeds. I just tested four times. Slowest download of the four tests, 8.14 Mbps. Fastest download was 10.30 Mbps. Upload speeds over four tests ranged from .90 to 1.02 Mbps. I use Clear.
goldy – Why the hell don’t you drop these jokers? Are you on contract?
We switched from Comcast to Qwest, over my objections. It was horrible, no service for almost 4 weeks, the landline had a constant buzzing noise, when a service tech would show up they invariably said “you need an Internet tech, I’m a phone tech” or the reverse, when we complained about the service tech not fixing anything the service tech was notified and called and yelled at us for complaining. And then the billing started. None of the billing was correct, no one could fix it, the credit department hounded us to pay. We ended up paying $50 more than we should, just to be rid of them. Now they send us checks. Brilliant company.
8:
A better example for broadband-access infrastructure would be South Korea, but that country also leads the planet in internet addiction. Internet cafes there are like Starbucks here, as in everyfuckingwhere. And the SK gov’t is working on legislation mandating what basically could be called voluntary blackouts of internet access for any residence with minors in it, of up to six hours a day.
Hello Goldy, Steph from Qwest here,
I am sorry you’ve had to go through this frustrating situation and lack of great customer service. Please email me at talktous@qwest.com with your billing phone number, billing address, and best contact number – I will have a higher tier specialist look at this situation and determine if the modem replacement is truly the answer to the problem.
thank you
Steph Lake
Manager, Talk To Qwest Team
“At Qwest your account information is confidential and protected by law, so I need your permission to access the account.”
@12
At least Qwest isn’t ignoring what is being said about it on-line. However I think it would be much better for your company if you didn’t screw up so badly in the first place. While even the best companies will occasionally make mistakes with Qwest a good experience seems to be more of an exception than the rule.
Maybe Qwest, in a show of good faith, would be willing to up your speed for you for gratis?? Too much to ask??
Or is “Steph’s” comment an admission that, unless you tell the world in a major blog what the problem is, that Qwest won’t bother to find out what the problem is on their own?
Well, Qwest people??