Qwest Support

Tue Apr 9 05:26:24 UTC 2002

One final post on this...

I called today because I needed to announce a couple of new routes. I
called their 877-37-LIGHT number...I get an amazing array of people when I
call this line.

The first lady is very nice, and even goes to check with somebody else
("BGP, I've heard of that"), and she tells me to email my filter change
request to support at qwestip.com. Ok, sounds fair. I do so, at around 2:30.
I wanted to get it in by 5, so I was in no rush. I also find out from the
nice lady that Qwest has a webpage that will submit the request for me
(qwestsource.net). I didn't have a username and password, so I filled out
the form and waited for a response.

At 3:30, I get the username and password for qwestsource. My luck, it
doesn't work.

Around 4:15, with not even an autoresponse from my email to support, I
call the LIGHT number again. I get the most clued-sounding person I've
talked to with Qwest yet. He's all crisp and Johnny TalkShow, and
authoritively states "There's a special address for BGP requests. Email
bgp at qwestip.net." I mention the bad username and password on qwestsource,
and he says "Ah yes, that sometimes happens. Here's a number to call
for the group that manages that..."

So I hang up the phone, satisfied. I email bgp at qwestip.net, and pick up
the phone to call about my qwestsource access. As I'm listening to the
phone tell me that I've called the telco provisioning group, I see the
bounce show up from bgp at qwestip.net.

I'm had to laugh at that...some dude in this mass queue in a cubicle
somewhere in Qwest is just sitting there talking like a tv character
issuing bum information authoritively, with a strange hint of pleasure
now that I think about it.

So I call the LIGHT number one more time. Third time's the charm,
apparently. I got a nice lady who put me right through to an engineer who
had access to the filters. He added the filters, we cleared, and he was
seeing all but one of the routes. We scratched our heads for a few
minutes and cleared again, which of course fixed it. He then proceeds to
log into the qwestsource backend to fix my account. All taken care of.

So, I guess my bottom line is that Qwest has good people. But not a good
setup. The problem isn't that the people I'm talking to aren't qualified
to do their jobs, it's just that Qwest's setup makes me talk to the wrong
people.

I like UUnet's way. I call up, hit 2-1-1, enter a series of digits, #,
another series of digits, #, and then I talk to the people who have
enable. With Qwest, I still have to enter our account number, but I'm sure
I end up in the same place the dsl customers go. At least, it seems like
it. One thing I must give Qwest (this goes for UUnet as well) is that I
have yet to wait on hold initially. I've spent a fair number of minutes on
hold, but not until after talking to somebody first.

If Qwest was setup like UUnet, I would think their IP customers would be
much more content. What am I going to call Qwest about? Two things.
Circuit down, routing change. Now that I have qwestsource working, I can
submit requests. The circuit really shouldn't go down. Regardless, it
would certainly be nice to be able to quickly talk to the people in charge
of running the network without trying to con my way through mostly good
intentioned front line phone jockeys.

Network seems pretty solid though, and I can live with the occaisional
support escapades when cutting my price in half and increasing my
available bandwidth significantly...overall, I'm satisfied so far. It's
not like I have a lot of time to give to this craziness, but if I have to
choose two from "bandwidth, really inexpensive, and my time", I'd have to
be spending somebody else's money to not pick the first two...

Andy

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Andy Dills                              301-682-9972
Xecunet, LLC                            www.xecu.net
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