[PLUG] DSL Modem & QWEST

[Kyle Hayes]

On Thursday 16 October 2003 08:54, Paul Johnson wrote:
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> On Thu, Oct 16, 2003 at 08:45:55AM -0700, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> > True enough.
> >
> > Is your experience with DSL really that bad? I host my personal web
> > and mail on a friend's Qwest-provided DSL line, and the uptime has
> > been quite good.
>
> I did tech support for Qwest working for $shithole-outsource-place.
> Qwest's own technical opinion of DSL is lower than that of mine.  I'm
> under NDA, but it should tell you something when the telco thinks DSL
> is a sham.  Working at the same place, I did tech support for @Home.
> Even though both the cable company and the telco outsource their
> support, at the cable company's got way more people taking calls and a
> lot fewer people calling in.

I had Speakeasy over Covad for a year (then moved out of DSL range) and the 
service was excellent.  There were two times when I had outages of over a few 
minutes.  One time was when Qwest opened the box at the end of the street and 
crossed a wire (I lost the other phone line then too).  The other time was 
when a router near the DSLAM went into the big bit bucket in the sky.

Speakeasy was not cheap (I had SDSL), but I always found the service to be 
excellent.  When I had a routing problem (they didn't filter traceroute 
packets like Comcast seems to be doing), I could call tech support and email 
them a traceroute trace and they'd look at it while we were on the phone.  
Tech support that knew something!  I got followups on my problem reports 
within a few hours and usually another about 24 hours after the problem was 
fixed making sure the problem was really fixed.

Now, I've got Comcast and the service is not great.  At least the hour-long 
outages in the middle of the day seem to be gone.  Comcast's DNS is flaky, 
and getting email through their servers is difficult at best.  My download 
rate is consistently around 220kB/s, so I really cannot complain much about 
that.  Upload is not pretty though.

Best,
Kyle