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recent qwest internet trouble

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For at least a month, my qwest dsl has been awful. I can connect just fine to my work VPN, but most things “web related” are slow- or no-loading.

It’s so bad I almost want to go back to broadstripe. Is anyone else having problems?

0 thoughts on “recent qwest internet trouble”

  1. They send people out if I have problems and replaced my modem. Document it from speakeasy’s site and complain.

  2. We called, and they updated the firmware on our modem. It may have made some kind of difference, but we’re primarily having routing problems. If you’re on windows, from the command line you can run the command “tracert” followed by a site to track (e.g. tracert google.com). For something like google, I’d expect to see under 20 hops (and out of qwest-land in 4), but it’s taking us up to 30+ hops to reach our destination site sometimes (hence the timeouts when we’re browsing the web).

    The qwest rep also told us that our connection might be experiencing “congestion” from too many other people in our neighborhood using the internet, which they apparently feel isn’t qwest’s problem. I can’t say I find that very convincing.

  3. I finally upgraded to the speedier DSL but made numerous calls to my ISP and know that the speed was often slower especially around 8AM to 9AM and them again earlier in the evening than it was suppose to be. Below is one sight where you give a quick and pretty accurate test. Upgrading helped quite a bit, but I am a little sore that I had to do so. In the meantime, the speed dropped drastically for about fifteen minutes one day after I upgraded.
    http://www.support-speedtest.com/test.php

    My ISP also told me that laying fiber optic lines in an area will have a negative affect on the DSL. I had not heard that before and don’t know if it is true but..

    Also construction in an area can disrupt the lines. The more we can know truth from fiction the better.

  4. We had a qwest guy come to the house yesterday after a week of trouble and he said our alarm system was messing things up (we’ve had the same system in place since we’ve had qwest, which has been for years). So he fiddled with some wires, departed, and this morning we woke up to no dsl once again. We’re near 26th and Yesler. It’s driving me crazy…..

  6. My husband called Qwest with similar issues and I believe their response was something along the lines of “unusual congestion, we’ll re-route you now” and within minutes we were back to workable connection speeds vs. the prior slower than molasses totally useless internet connections.

  7. I have spoken to the corporate office in Denver in the past. If enough of us call and request qwest to put cable in our neighborhood. Hence they can bump it up on the list for an upgrade of service ahead of other neighborhoods. I also heard that broadstripe (ghettovision) is being sold.

  8. ISPs are great at trying to deflect any problems towards something other than their service – your modem, router, alarms now appartently. Anything to prevent them from having to address the issue. I could not get Qwest to fulfill my order when I tried to switch to them. I made 20+ phone calls to Qwest trying to get the password to connect to their network and my speed up from 600 kbps to my 7 Mbps plan I was being billed. My equipment was blamed over and over during this process and was removed to eliminate this excuse. I finally got descent speeds and inquired about the free static IP that was promised upon subscribing. They refused to honor this part of the agreement. I mentioned making false statements to gain my business was considered slamming and was against the law. I was skeptical of the service they would provide and since they never fulfilled my order and I never used their service, I cancelled it. They charged me $200 for an early cancelation fee and I ended up with a $600 bill from Qwest for a service I never used one day. I then received a letter from Qwest stating I would be sent to collections if I did not pay my bill. I called and wrote them that this was an account in dispute, to suspend it and to not act in anyway until it was resolved. I then contacted the WA State Attorney General’s Office and filed a complaint. The AG’s Office got Qwest to back down at no cost to me other than hours upon hours of my time. I was a long term Qwest phone customer in good standing for over a decade.
    So I stuck with Broadstripe as their horrible service suddenly didn’t seem so bad. About a month later their service began to have problems until they finally went down every day for 6 weeks. Contacting Broadstipe did no good for me either. Only when I contacted the Seattle Office of Cable Communication did I get any resolution ( http://www.cityofseattle.net/cable/).
    So, what I have learned is these companies do not react to customer complaints but they do respond to our local and state officials.

    So if you have problems start with the Cable Office. They will more than likely get your problem resolved. But, if not, file a complaint with the AG’s Office. The AG has enforcement power and can suspend or revoke business licenses, levy fines or in extreme cases criminal indictments. This office will act more severely the more complaints they receive but usually a phone call to an attorney at the misbehaving business gets the problem resolved. Make sure to put everything in writing, cc your own email and then escalate as you will have to show you at least gave your ISP a chance to correct the problem.
    Once your problem is resolved, call Verizon and tell them you want FIOS. They have no plans to move into Seattle in the next few years but they do record our calls and may adjust plans. It can’t hurt. I called Comcast but they say they won’t come into our area if there is any competition so I doubt I’ll ever support them since they are not supporting us in our time of need. I even mentioned that they should not consider Brownstripe competition. Plus I hear lots of complaints about Comcast but lots of compliments about FIOS.

    This ISP issue is a failure on the part of the Cable Communications office to get us a decent ISP and fulfill our Cable Customer Bill of Rights which can be found on their site. Letters to the City Council may help get them moving but the staff says they are trying to get more providers in our area.

  9. I’m on Qwest now. No problems recently, however in the past I’ve experienced slowdowns during “peak time”, due to congestion on their network. This hasn’t happened much lately.

    I have noticed that the combination modem/router supplied by Qwest (an Actiontec 1000) does not handle large numbers of connections well. Once only a few hundred connections are open, even if they’re all idle, latency jumps dramatically and connections start dropping at random. I was able to reconfigure my software to not make so many connections (disabling DHT on my torrent client helped), but for larger networks it might be worth disabling the modem’s built-in NAT and using a separate, external router.

    All in all I’ve been satisfied with Qwest since switching from Speakeasy. I’m on a “small business package”, so I might be avoiding the pitfalls of being on a standard residential connection. I know I get a lot more upload bandwidth than the residential packages have, and I talk to a different customer service department. The price is unbeatable for the bandwidth, and it’s quite reliable.

    I know my connection was better on Speakeasy; they even offer a 99.9% SLA on their their DSL, and ping to the nearest backbone was always in the single digits on Speakeasy, whereas on Qwest it’s over 50ms to the nearest backbone. Speakeasy was always 1 hop to a backbone, connected in the Westin Tower in downtown Seattle, where as Qwest is 4 hops to a backbone, connected in San Jose. I just couldn’t justify the extra price anymore, though.

  10. I was having horrible problems with qwest dsl in Fremont. Nothing had changed on my end. After going through the purgatory that is qwest’s phone support I got a tech out to my apartment. He told me the new fiber lines they laid in the area was negatively affecting the old DSL connections. My connection was switched to the fiber line and I saw dramatic increases in speed and signal to noise ratio. There could be problems if you have your DSL through a reseller like Speakeasy, I don’t know if they can switch you to the fiber. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Qwest-Denies-Using-FTTN-G