Teleidoscope

Tue, Aug 14, 2007

Phone Company: Aaargh

Posted at 1:17 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Qwest really needs to do a better job of letting its left hand know what its right hand is doing.

My DSL dropped again at about 11:40 am. When I called to find out why, they told me that everything should still be working fine, and that the switch back of my ISP to FRII has been postponed from tomorrow to the 20th. After an hour of thrashing (including a lot of time listening to their on-hold advertisements) they finally decided that the ISP change was not really postponed to the 20th, it was happening today. Without any notice to me or FRII.

I called FRII tech support and we eventually got the connection back up. They needed to reconfigure some things at their end now that Qwest is connecting me to them again.

I wish I could get my underlying DSL from someone other than Qwest. If I could, I would change phone providers. Unfortunately, none of the alternatives to Qwest do residential DSL. And the ones that do business DSL are a little too pricey.

Some other observations:

When a connection drops without any changes to the modem settings, it is not likely to come back up again if all you do is tweak the modem settings.

On-Hold messages that recommend using the website support mechanism are likely to produce homicidal impulses in people whose web access is down. Messages bragging about the quality of your High-Speed Broadband just rub salt in the wounds.

I am enjoying the faster DSL, though. Things are noticeably snappier and YouTube is actually usable, which it wasn't before.

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