When my company's old internet provider and web hosting service gave me 30 days notice that they were going out of business, I was in a hurry to find a new ISP (internet service provider). I investigated several companies, but eventually decided on Qwest based on the recommendation of the MRI franchise (Management Recruiters International). Of course no contract to sign and no installation fees also played an important role.

Anyone who has switched ISP's for a business can tell you the process can be grueling and often times confusing. I scheduled a Monday morning installation time. Qwest showed up and installed the line and their equipment. The technician promptly plugged the DSL into the Cisco router which was connected to the technicians lap top. I saw him pull up several internet sites and I was satisfied the connection was working. However, the problems began when I asked him to connect the DSL to our proxy server. He then told me they did not support installing DSL via a proxy server. Ridiculous I thought they advertised that they were focused only on business DSL. As I was on the phone with my sales rep, the installation tech slipped out the door. I figured I would go ahead and plug it into the proxy server and see what happened. Nothing happened. After investigating, I noticed the Cisco router which was part of their required hardware needed to be reconfigured. Qwest would not support it, but offered to reconfigure the Cisco router for $500. So much for the free installation. Qwest's other solution was to reconfigure every other piece of hardware on the network to work with the new router. Reconfiguring 40+ computers and printers was not an option in my eyes. After three weeks of not having the internet or a web page I gave up and studied cisco routers and reconfigured the router myself.

After getting the internet up and running my next task was to set up our web page. I changed the domain contacts and DNS server information to point to our new ISP. All the information looked good and I was proud of myself at handling the process with such ease. I down loaded my web page to the Qwest servers and was disappointed when our web page didn't show up. Apparently Qwest had made a mistake on their MX records. I had trouble understanding how a company that is a professional ISP, who fills out MX records on a daily basis could have such a difficult time with this MX record. It took two additional weeks before our web page was finally up and running. When making changes to our web site I found the web hosting tools they offered to be clunky, awkward, and time consuming. I couldn't just upload a file via FTP and have the new changes take place. Instead I had to upload the file, submit it to a test site, view the test site, re-enter my password, and then confirm the changes to the test site were correct before the changes would actually take place. So a process that normally takes a minute or two just got turned into a 10 minute process. By the way if you take Qwest up on their offer to design three free web pages for you, then you will never be able to make changes to your site yourself, you will be at the mercy of one of their incompetent technicians.

The final step of switching ISP's was to setup e-mail. I logged into the Qwest web site, asked for the appropriate usernames, and was faxed back the usernames and passwords. Needless to say this was not a trouble free process. About half of the passwords Qwest faxed to be did not work. Over the next two weeks my company hired several new employees. Again about half of the new passwords for each employee did not work.

During the past 3 months I have spent about 25+ hours a week on the phone with Qwest technical support. As you can see talking on the phone with Qwest tech support was taking up most of my days and keeping me from my work. In the process of speaking with tech support I came to realize that Qwest contracts their tech support out to third party vendors. How am I suppose to report a problem with their exchange severs and get them to fix it when the technical support engineers are not even in the same city as the exchange server? I have worked IS/IT for 10 years now, so I like to think I know a little something when it comes to trouble shooting computers and computer networks. The Qwest techs kept trying to fix our computers when the problem was clearly with their computers. I explained how I arrived at the conclusion the problem was on their side, but the tech had clearly received inadequate training and was trained that you only do A, B, and C to fix the problem. I was often promised to receive a phone call from a tech, which rarely happened. On average it took about 7 to 8 business days before any of my technical problems were fixed.

We signed up for ADSL at 768K. The speeds were pretty good but when I benchmarked them at www.computingcentral.com they averaged in the 350K - 450K range which is not a surprise as most DSL providers never reach their advertised speeds. On average the DSL only went down about 2 or 3 times a month, which isn't bad, and it only took them about 30 minutes to an hour to fix the DSL when it went down.

As I reflect I laugh at the radio commercials I heard. Qwest advertised that they concentrated on business DSL. It appears to me Qwest would be better off catering to personal DSL use at home. Qwest does not demonstrate the technical know how to be a DSL provider to businesses. Any business on the internet would like their web page, internet access, and email to be operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. I would say about 50% of the time we were having some kind of technical problem with Qwest which hindered our ability to operate as a dot com company. I also forgot to mention that when I got the bill they billed duplicate times for the same things. I would not recommended Qwest to anyone whether it is personal or business use.



Recommended: No

Monthly fees (US$): $200
Platform used: Windows NT
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Database used: MS-SQL
Main focus of Web site: Sales/E-commerce