Qwest customer feedback

[AltTabbins]

Anybody here subscribe to qwest's internet service?
I just changed over from comcast (actually a downgrade), but I hope to get better pings with DSL. My apartment's cable is old and rotting so it will hopefully help out when I change to the above ground, newer phone lines

What do you think about them? My old buddy uses them and says they are great. The rented modem also doubles as a wireless G router which is nice (my belkin is on its last legs).

 

[millhouse]

Anybody here subscribe to qwest's internet service?
I just changed over from comcast (actually a downgrade), but I hope to get better pings with DSL. My apartment's cable is old and rotting so it will hopefully help out when I change to the above ground, newer phone lines

What do you think about them? My old buddy uses them and says they are great. The rented modem also doubles as a wireless G router which is nice (my belkin is on its last legs).

I actually didnt have too good of luck when I had qwest dsl however, that was back in 2001-2002. It started out ok but my port went bad at the CO and after awhile I had to call at least 3-4 times a day to have the port bounced. Qwest knew the port was bad and simply refused to replace it. The chances of you running into a similiar problem are very slim to none. Really the only thing you should have to worry about is customer service and qwest has never been very good at that IMHO. (results vary per location!!)

P.S. that was in minnesota.

 

[SparksNelec]

I'm in MN too on the Minneapolis/Saint Paul border. I've had Qwest DSL for the past year and a few months. During that time I've seen two short outages that I can remember. Price and high upload speeds were the reasons I went with Qwest. In that regard, no other service available to me comes close. The Actiontec GT701 modem connects to the DSLAM (about 12000ft away) at 1500/800kb/s speeds. The upload speeds are ~80KB/s from my FTP server. If you choose Qwest.net as your ISP, it's only $9.99 and you don't have to put up with any of that MSN garbage. Pings from a dos command are ~44ms. I have a private Unreal Tournament that shows ping times of ~100 to ~110ms for my friends that connect to it. Those are all within 15mi of my location.

The thing I hate the most about the service is the PPPoA protocol they use. There are hardly any modems in the US that support it so you're pretty much stuck with what Qwest provides. That creates another problem I've all but given up on; I can't get the modem to pass the public IP address and traffic to my own router. I'm forced to use the modem as a router too. If you're running dedicated servers, this gets to be a pain. I've worked around the problem for the most part (you can do stuff like double NAT'ing) but I like having the freedom to do whatever I want with the public IP address that I used to have with cable. That's something I wished I understood before signing up to the service.

As for the wireless portion, it works but it doesn't do anything particularly well. I've only used it with an Intel wireless card in my laptop so my experience is limited. I've found the range to be average and WPA encryption to not work at all. I've had to settle for WEP.

For the average home user who browses the web and does some online gaming, I'd rate the connection service as a 7 out of 10 (an 8 if they got WPA working). Customer service is another 7. You have to go through lots of menu choices and probably spend some time waiting on hold but you do talk to someone who speaks plain english (at least so far). I'm being kinda hard on them since I would rather choose my own modem than be provided with a feature loaded but average performing one.

Hope you found my experience useful. Good luck with your new service!

 

[AltTabbins]

Thanks for the replies
I talked to a few friends around here who said about the same thing. One of the biggest complaints was the constant calls from their customer service dept trying to get you to upgrade. As for that 9.99 with no MSN thing, I wish I would have known about that before I subscribed. Im paying like $45.00 + modem rental and I will never use the msn part

anyways, thanks for the feedback!

 

[Darkstar850]

I had a 256k line installed for my dad's business. Except for that POS actiontec thing, the service has been fine. I think we've only had one period of down time for about 2 hours so far in a year. This is in Portland, OR btw.