[DM-MUG] ISP advice needed

[cmsspace]

As a field service tech for HR Block, I've installed over 25 Qwest DSL's in the Des Moines area.  Because we bridged all the Qwest Modems, I've has to call and work with a Qwest tech support person every time.  90% of the time I've called, I've spoken to a fairly nice, polite person.  Now that's not to say that they've been technically savvy  but they have all been located in the US and have helped us bridge the MODEM.  The fact is that we have been moving away from other DSL carriers towards Qwest and I have been happy to change over.  I can give you on example of why.  At one of our locations we were unable to get a Qwest DSL line until this a few weeks ago.  Last season the DSL in that office went off because of a power failure.  The office was without power for more than 4 hours.  After the power came on we couldn't get the DSL to work.  After hours of trying to find the problem, we discovered that the provider (not Qwest) had to actually restart the DSL on their end.  I've never heard of that problem from Qwest.  The provider stated that this would happen every time the DSL was off-line for more than 4 hours.  I immediately decided to try to switch to Qwest.  (Since we switched providers in that office, the DSL speeds have more than doubled.)

I'm not a Qwest representative and I personally use Iowa Telecom at home but I did want to put in some of my own experience.  We chose Iowa Telecom because it was less expensive at the time we were looking for DSL.  Since we've been hooked up our DSL/phones rates have crept up to about where the Qwest levels were.

I'd say my experience with Qwest has been has been a good one over-all.  

On Jul 13, 2009, at 10:49:45 PM, "Matt Stanton" <inflatablesoulmate at brothersofchaos.com> wrote:

From:   "Matt Stanton" <inflatablesoulmate at brothersofchaos.com>
Subject:    Re: [DM-MUG] ISP advice needed
Date:   July 13, 2009 10:49:45 PM CDT
To: "Des Moines Mac Users Group" <dmmug at dmmug.org>
Switching to qwest is give-and-take. For one, dsl loses transmit speed 
the further you are away from the local switch, so when they say 
"1.5Mbps download", they mean "1.5Mbps download *max*". They seem to do 
a pretty good job of getting pretty close to the 1.5Mbps max number, 
though. If you want that extra 700Kbps, just realize that you are 
giving up the ability to speak with someone from the United States if 
you have a problem. I've had to talk with someone in India 3-5 times to 
get a problem fixed every time I've had a problem. They always tell you 
to clear your browser cache, which does pretty much nothing (if I was 
having problems that seemed browser-cache related, I would have done 
that long before calling, but they assume that every customer is a 
driveling idiot).

All-in-all, when qwest is working, I'm perfectly happy with it. When 
it's not, there's no point in calling tech support. You can call the 
local office and punch buttons until you're actually talking to someone 
near here to get some reasonable help or report an outage, but 
apparently you can't tell tech support anything useful, because they 
have no way to report to the local techies that something is wrong.

Jon Engelhardt wrote:
> Not sure this is a Mac related topic but I would appreciate feed back, 
> if you would prefer to share advice off list, please email me privately.
>
> We live in the country near Adel and have had Prairieinet.net for 6 
> years. It has worked very well for a broadband set up, it was our 
> only choice at the time (besides dial up) and the service has been 
> excellent. However, we can only download at at 896 kb/s and that just 
> seems slow when compared to Qwest @1.5 MS/s for $10.00 less a month. 
> At this time we can access Qwest so there is a choice.
>
> Thoughts? Ideas?
>
> Thanks.
> Jon
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