QWEST.NET Outage affecting Capitol Hill

I heard about a few others across the hill with qwest issues right now. How frustrating! And bad for my business!

If you have willing neighbors with alternate ISPs you can arrange to share your access when their service is down and vice versa. We have two DSL lines with Speakeasy and Qwest along with Clearwire service shared via WiFi. I think that's one line too many, but redundant access methods are great if you can work it out.

Also consider putting your hardware on a UPS if continuous access is important even during a power outage.

Have qwest. Not down. Knock wood. Can't remember catchy name for my sub-neighborhood, but near On 15th Video.

we leave our (comcast) wifi open (near Broadway and Harrison); feel free to borrow the signal anytime :)

I'm trying to reach somebody to ask a few questions about the outage but no dice yet. I'm not a customer so keep getting thrown out of the phone tree. Lame that there was (and still is) no announcement about this in Qwest's "support" forums
http://www.qwest.com/customerService/

We have Qwest internet and if this post goes through, the internet must be working here. Typically, however, we have a terrible connection, and most evenings it's slower than dial-up. According to Qwest tech suport, though, we have a robust connection. Ugh.

The current outage seems to be confined to people using QWEST.NET as an ISP, the underlying DSL service is up. Since my original post the ISP service has come online twice that we've seen for a short period of time and then gone down again.

Final Answer: I've been reporting terrible speed problems to QWEST for years (DSL customer for almost 12 years). Just recently upgraded to 7mb service from 1.5mb in a last ditch effort to get decent service. After the upgrade we were still logging 0.1-0.3 mbps speeds (using their own speedtest application) which, as you noted, approach dial-up service.

The problem gets worse starting in the afternoon and becomes critical between 9pm-11pm at night. We observed the problem using video streaming services (Netflix is a great test). I've been tracking the problem with them and calling *every* time we see a speed problem since the start of December. They started by telling me there was nothing wrong with the line (they look at what their equipment tells them the service is and not what is currently happening on the wire), then they said the problem was too many devices trying to access the connection (disabled WiFi, removed all but one machine from the connection and reproduced the problem), then they reset the line which temporarily brings the speed back up (and gets you off the phone) but the problem returns within a day. At various stages I got told that there were gateway problems (congestion) that would take about two weeks to fix(!), that they were moving me to another gateway (at least three times), and finally they got a real technician... read more look at the problem found the issue and made a change that has given us reasonable service (3mbs) for the last couple of weeks.

I did some research and it seems that a lot of people with QWEST service on the hill are having the same problem. My guess is that they have too many subscribers for their service capacity.

I know its frustrating, but you have to stay on them and refuse to let go until you get the service you are paying for.

It would be great if we could document all the people on the hill with QWEST who are having problems and approach them as a neighborhood group. (This post comes courtesy of Fuel Coffee's WiFi)

the irony of posting on the internet about not having access to the internet?

not that I wouldn't be screaming and crying if I was in your situation (we had multiple back and forth with comcast technicians to get ours in good working order), but it's still funny ;)

My home Qwest DSL in Greenwood has been down since Saturday afternoon. The router reports authentication failures.

I've got Qwest.net DSL too. If MSN customers aren't having problems then it might be that Qwest's authentication services are down, while MSN's, with their separate accounts database, is up.

On the other hand, I'm at my Office downtown, which is also Qwest.net DSL, and it is working fine. Maybe there is enough traffic on the line that the PPP connection has never dropped and it hasn't had to reauthenticate.

I never thought I'd say this, but I am seriously considering Comcast.

Internet connection has been up and down again four times (that I noticed) since my post from Fuel.

We're going to a Superbowl party (I really don't know why as I don't understand American sports, they're so... naff) so I'm going to ignore this problem for a few hours and pretend I understand what a rebound is.

I switched to them about two years ago (Comcast dropped me several times a week, and although they tried valiantly to diagnose the problem, I finally gave up), it's been almost perfect in that time. It's more expensive, but I like it.

Do I maybe remember that Speakeasy actually buys their DSL connections from Qwest anyway?! Who knows, I can't keep all that stuff straight.

We have had qwest for 3 years and recently also upgraded to the 7mbs service. Same issue as everyone else. The connection pretty much dies from 4pm to 8pm every night. The upgrade didnt help at all. Very frustrating. We have been through 2 new modems (at Qwests insistance) and are pretty much done with them. But what else is there? We dont do cable (no cable lines into the house) so it would have to be DSL. Im thinking we are stuck with Qwest.

I know a lot of you have switched between comcast and qwest but has anyone moved from Broadstripe (formerly Millenium) over to qwest? I would've never thought I would consider using ANY service of qwests again until I moved into a bldg that has an exclusive cable contract with broadstripe - possibly the worst cable internet isp I have ever encountered.

thx

I've had similar problems to those described above in the "The Horror! The Horror!" post.
I also was affected by the qwest.net ISP outage this past weekend. It was down Saturday evening, came back up Saturday after midnight, and then down *again* on Sunday morning.

My service quality issues spanned the last three months and I finally got them to mostly fix it. I had packet loss and latency problems (hurts netflix streaming and video especially, but doesn't really show up well on bandwidth tests) and for the first 3 or 4 tech support calls they denied the problems. Got switched to different gateways a couple times.
Finally got through to a manager last month and got a tech support guy who actually knew stuff and he got me onto a server that didn't have the latency and packet loss problems. I also upgraded to 5 Mbps, and get about 4.2 Mbps usually.

I still want to switch to Comcast but Qwest has me locked into a 2 year contract and it would probably be more work than it's worth to try getting out of that when I have 6 months left on the contract.