Bear in mind that the financial situation at Qwest is bad. They are
getting ready to take an estimated $20 to $30 billion writeoff
on accounting restatements (mostly of "goodwill") and will probably be
sanctioned by the SEC, as indicated in wire stories today.
Their Portland office is across the street from me, and my phone and
DSL is dependent on them of course, so this is of direct concern in
my case!
I should mention that despite its deserved reputation for greedy
management (whether as Pacific Northwest Bell, U S West or now
Qwest), ops has generally been pretty good and the retail (consumer/
small business) DSL service, from my personal experience, is top notch.
(Of course, they run it on FreeBSD so that should tell you something
We certainly know from experience that a major financial upheaval can
affect operations at least indirectly (loss of management attention,
budget cuts, deferred maintenance, cutbacks in monitoring and response
systems, etc.). On the other hand, it's not a good idea to overreact
to news like this. So I would proceed with due caution concerning Qwest
transit. As a wise person once said, don't put all your routes in one
pipe.
Bear in mind that the financial situation at Qwest is bad.
Isn't that partially due to deals with Enron on which they
misrepresented sales numbers?
We certainly know from experience that a major financial upheaval can
affect operations at least indirectly (loss of management attention,
budget cuts, deferred maintenance, cutbacks in monitoring and response
systems, etc.). On the other hand, it's not a good idea to overreact
to news like this. So I would proceed with due caution concerning Qwest
transit. As a wise person once said, don't put all your routes in one
pipe.
I wouldn't touch Qwest, based on the Enron issue, if nothing else.
Bear in mind that the financial situation at Qwest is bad.
Isn't that partially due to deals with Enron on which they
misrepresented sales numbers?
Partially, but not primarily. The lead front page article in the
Wednesday WSJ is about how badly mismanaged Qwest is. The gist of it
is that US West was a sleepy RBOC with mediocre management, then Qwest
which was what one might call a dot.fiber bubble company bought US
West with fluffy puffy stock, then its incredibly arrogant and not
very skillful management ran the company into the ground.
If you don't get the Journal, the online edition allows me to mail
copies of articles to individuals, so write me if you want a copy.
I didn't see the WSJ article, but as a non-trivial Qwest Customer I can
attest to the fact that there are *serious* management issues within the
US West half of Qwest.
They were bad before qwest took them over. I hoped Qwest would have fixed
things. Now they're worse.
I've been trying to get a quote for a PVC on an ATM circuit from them for
6 months now.. Customer service is going downhill. They're laying off
the competent employees. They're reorganizing every week. In the last
year or so I've had at least 6 sales reps. Just as we get them started on
our issues they get changed. We can't talk to anyone but our reps
because we're large enough that we're "too important of a customer" and
they want us only to go through our sales engineer.
We have billing issues almost 2 years old which haven't been taken of.
We have circuits which were requested to be disconnected which still are
active and being billed. We have a hunt group at one site which they've
been trying to fix the hunting on (or at least SAYING They are trying to
fix the hunt on) for at least 4 months now. And on and on and on and on.
We had a conference call with our new sales rep and a couple of other
people such as billing specialists, etc. It took us well over an hour
just to go through all the pending stuff. We will see if they actually
get anything done.
I've told their management that they have something seriously broken
internally that they need to fix, and they have acknowledged it. I just
suspect that Qwest management trying to fix what is broken with Qwest is
kinda like someone who doesn't even know how to turn on a computer trying
to fix a router.
As a final insult, Qwest is trying to convince the FCC to give them LATA
relief (which would be a mixed blessing for us), because "they are getting
beat up by the competition". I say, show me ANYONE who is competing with
you and we'll switch tomorrow.
