On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 12:27:45PM -0600, Nate Carlson wrote:
> I've also seen times where the analog side of a phone line is dead,
> but DSL still works fine.

I had that - and ended up getting effectively a third of a month of
free phone service out of it.

My analog service broke sometime Friday - I got home 6ish, no dial
tone.  Borrowed next door neighbor's phone, called in a trouble
ticket.  Some back and forth the next day - the tech on the other end
of the phone told me about 3PM Saturday that the tech in Minneapolis
had flagged it "DSL - No Work on DSL on Weekends".  She also told me
that there wasn't going to be anyone working on _any_ lines on Sunday.
Problem finally got fixed about 10-11AM on Monday, and my letter to
QWest & the PUC went out on Tuesday - from my point of view, I spent
three days without domestic dial-tone, and that was unacceptable.

I got an acknowledgement of complaint from the QWest MN/VP's office,
and a credit - I did _not_ get any indication that they had done
anything to their procedures to keep this from happening to anyone
else, which I had also asked for.

I did get told that you have to lie to QWest to get certain kinds of
service - I was having problems with my DSL for a while, it would just
go away.  Their side would claim my DSL device was talking, even when
it had NO electrical connectivity to ANYTHING!  After fighting with
this for a month, I found out part of what was happening.  I'd call in
the problem, the remote tech would do their thing to patch it, and
schedule an on-site to the CO for a local tech.  The next day, I'd get
a call asking if it was working - from the remote office.  I'd say,
'Yes, right now it is.'  They would mark the problem resolved, and THE
LOCAL TECH'S VISIT TO THE CO WOULD BE CANCELLED!  So, I asked, 'You
mean, if I want to make certain the tech visits the local CO, I have
to ask "Has the local tech made any notes on the case yet?", and when
the answer is "No", say "It's still not working."?'  And the manager
told me that was the only way I could guarantee a visit to the CO from
the local tech.

QWest is insane.  I'm still a DSL user, but mostly because, since that
problem got fixed (they needed to replace something at my CO), I have
had NO problems.  That's in ... over three years now?  As long as it's
not broke, I'm not going to try to fix it.  If I do end up dealing
with QWest tech support for too long in the future, I'm going to
seriously look at DirecWay satellite PC service.

-- 
Scott Raun
sraun at fireopal.org

_______________________________________________
TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list