> >What makes you think Qwest can afford to stay in business if they willy > >nilly go chasing after all these special interests who make up a very tiny > >portion of their market (i.e., LUGers)? > > IIRC, they have a monoploy on the lines to my house. If they want to > limit the services they will provide to me, while providing those > services choices to others in my general area, and provide no time > frame for the availability of those services to me, I would prefer > that another be awarded the benefit and responsibility of that > monopoly. Am I unreasonable to complain? Depends on whom you complain to, I guess. I have plenty of complaints about Qwest as well. How is that going to help anything? Venting has its place, but more often than not it's a substitute for taking a little more effort to do something useful. If you want to change anything, you vote with your $, and pool your voices and direct the combination at a place where it can have some effect. I'm not happy about local loop monopolies either. But there's more to it than you hear from the people who usually list all the things that are bad about it. Sure, the loop owners are slow to give service to other carriers, etc., etc. But they also have to use their own staff to do the work for the competitors they have to let into their CO. Many CLECs are smug about this, but that certainly affects the service Qwest can give their own customers. Seems to me that it's more reasonable to think realistically about their motivations as a business. Too often the complaints I see here state or imply pretty unrealistic expectations. Do you really think any business with the capital investment that Qwest has made into their DSL infrastructure has a financial option to consider a switch to a whole new technology? And one that's not state of the art by any means? Think of something that's actually in both Qwest's and geeks' interest and try to get them to work toward that. Andy