[CLUE-Tech] Qwest DSL Pricing Change

[Nate Duehr]

Hi Tim,

How's things?  Hope all is well with you -- glad to hear you were also 
able to take advantage of the pricing changes.

On Mar 10, 2004, at 1:40 PM, Timothy C. Klein wrote:
> Well, I had to call Qwest to get my order to actually be done
> (translation wasn't completed.  Interesting, I would have guessed that
> someone in the CO needed to up the speed on a DSLAM, but in can be done
> remotely, via computer, by translations.)

Agreed, should be a "simple" configuration change if you're in range.  
I too had an odd "delay" show up in my order -- originally 5 business 
days, ended up taking 10 and an extended delivery date with no 
explanation in the service order, but oh well.  When I called at the 
end of 5 biz days to check on it, the customer service rep was even 
confused as to why the computer system had set the install date out to 
10 biz days.  No big deal to me, though... waiting ten days for a free 
upgrade is no skin off my nose!

My theory is that they got slammed with change orders and since these 
aren't making them any money the ticket system slowed them down a bit.  
Just a guess.

They definitely gained a notch on the customer-loyalty scale from me, 
overall though.  Free upgrades are always worth some tire rubber down 
the road.  ;-)

> But I now have 1.5 Mb up and 700 Kb down.  Very cool.  My pessimism was
> unwarranted.  And the stuff I read about attenuation was either wrong,
> or the Zoom reports the number differently.

I'm seeing a solid 1.5 Mb toward the house and over 800 Kb outbound.  
Quite happy with the change!  (Ooooh... bittorrent... yummmmy 
bandwidth...)

Haven't seen any slowdowns.  A friend who ordered an upgrade thinks 
he's seeing some high-use slowdowns when his local DSLAM is a bit 
overloaded in the evenings, but he's also happy with the upgrade.  He 
can't always run a full 1.5Mb to known machines that can definitely 
feed at that speed (we have mutual access to a machine on a 100Mb/sec 
Cogent pipe... Cogent's big pipes are a bit overloaded at times, but we 
consistently have always been able to push 75Mb/sec to just about 
anywhere from that machine... unfortunately that's only allowed during 
tests and certain times of day as we'd affect the customers of the ISP 
who's hosting it for us as a favor).

One difference between his circuit and mine is that I'm pretty sure I'm 
serviced directly off the CO.  He's definitely serviced off a DSLAM at 
the corner of his street, therefore the DSLAM probably only has 2 or 
possibly three T1's (1.544 Mb/s) feeding it from upstream.

Good stuff.  :-)  No outage during the upgrade that any of my 
monitoring software saw either.  You gotta love a clean upgrade without 
any outage/down-time... not that there's anything that important 
here...

Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com