{"id":1271,"date":"2010-08-27T11:50:51","date_gmt":"2010-08-27T18:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xmission.com\/blog\/?p=1271"},"modified":"2017-01-17T14:07:20","modified_gmt":"2017-01-17T21:07:20","slug":"an-xmission-customer-speaks-on-qwest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xmission.com\/blog\/2010\/08\/27\/an-xmission-customer-speaks-on-qwest","title":{"rendered":"An XMission Customer Speaks On Qwest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Please note: As of January 1, 2017, XMission no longer sells DSL services.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In response to prior XMission blog entry<\/a> I wrote on Qwest’s tactics to eliminate 3rd party ISPs, along with a City Weekly article<\/a> on the same topic, XMission customer Pete Doenges felt compelled to write the following. He sent it to me for accuracy checking and I asked him if it would be OK if I reposted it here.<\/p>\n

I echo Kaylynn’s experience (from the City Weekly article: Qwest Accused of Lying to Customers, Wholesale partners say company has ‘Qwestionable’ motives<\/a>). My wife and I had XMission as an outstanding ISP from their early days with phone dialup modem forward to DSL more recently. When Qwest ran DSL into our area, we paid for the DSL service, stayed with XMission as ISP and e-mail provider, and enjoyed great speeds in the 1.5 Mbps realm. During this time, we’ve had terrible intermittent noise on our voice phone line, and Qwest still cannot reliably eliminate it.<\/p>\n

Qwest ran fiber optics into our area eventually with speeds at 7 Mbps and up. Within the last year, an upgrade of a Qwest DSL modem resulted in dysfunction of our network tie. A Qwest repairman visited our home, then went out to a nearby phone pole to work on Qwest equipment, and eventually fixed the immediate problem. He said he moved wires that were incorrectly placed. From then on, our DSL-based speed slowed to something barely useable. It looked like Qwest demoted our connection speed because we were with XMission as ISP.<\/p>\n

I called XMission and they said the speed problem was with Qwest. I called the Utah PSC and got an expert on the line who explained the Telecommunications Act of 1996. He confirmed Qwest being able to choke out other ISPs on substandard speed-limited connections, while Qwest offers much higher speeds than our earlier DSL if Qwest is ISP. We sadly switched, after calling XMission and commiserating with them about this monopolistic practice. The PSC acknowledged this seems anti-competitive, but it’s the law. Who made such a law for Utah!?<\/p>\n

When we’ve dealt with XMission as ISP over the years, we get really sharp people with great attitudes who help, set things right quickly, and freely share their own problems and solutions with us in an honest open manner. We don’t talk to a tech support group half a world away working from a rigid company “play book” unresponsive to our problem. We bemoan this loss. In the meantime, we have more speed, yet the phone service remains poor. At times I can barely get through a call with Qwest tech support or friends due to line noise. We hear folklore about lines getting wet with crosstalk, but a phone company is supposed to know how to fix such things.<\/p>\n

When I could not make an AT&T 3G MicroCell work in my home, lengthy and multiple calls with AT&T, Qwest and Actiontec (who makes a DSL modem for Qwest) failed to resolve the problem. These companies in my case had no clue how to make apparently ubiquitous consumer devices work together. I was repeatedly sent to another company to solve the problem, and they had different stories about how to coordinate a cure among them. I put a non-Qwest router into my home network and everything now works. The router portion of the DSL modem by Qwest and Actiontec simply failed to work with AT&T’s device. The expensive Qwest DSL modem\/router I convinced myself to purchase now does nothing but DSL, I’ve got slower speeds than I paid for with Qwest, and I had to bear the expense of another router to make AT&T 3G MicroCell work. Consumer – BEWARE!<\/p>\n

It appears that the 800-lb gorilla wins, while decent companies like XMission are edged out. Qwest could have done a deal with XMission about sharing its fiber-optics resources with XMission for a fee, giving the consumer choice again while allowing Qwest to make money with its infrastructure. It seems that the FCC and Washington must be utterly asleep at the switch. Monopoly without apology abounds. Big corporate lobbies must be alive and well. The killer mentality – of bigger and central and consolidated are better – will doom us. Some day the big telecoms that don’t know how to work with each other will bring the system to its knees, by the sheer weight of system complexity that nobody fully understands.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Please note: As of January 1, 2017, XMission no longer sells DSL services. In response to prior XMission blog entry I wrote on Qwest’s tactics to eliminate 3rd party ISPs, along with a City Weekly article on the same topic, XMission customer Pete Doenges felt compelled to write the following. He sent it to me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[133,130],"tags":[324,325],"class_list":["post-1271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local","category-tech","tag-century-link","tag-qwest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xmission.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xmission.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xmission.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xmission.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xmission.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1271"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/xmission.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4725,"href":"https:\/\/xmission.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1271\/revisions\/4725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xmission.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xmission.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xmission.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}