Anybody have Qwest WAN circuits?

My company just bought Qwest a few months ago and I was just wondering what to expect as far as the way Qwest does things. Are they a pain to deal with, or is it smooth sailing? I work on WAN circuits in a NOC (routing, switching, etc.) so I'm going to have to deal with the Qwest side of the house on a regular basis, I presume. Just curious as to what people's experience with Qwest is like.

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ssampier

As a customer I found their circuits pretty reliable. Ocassionally we would have a cut fiber that would take a few hours to fix. Granted I never called their support line. Utah education and libraries has a central agency for that called the Utah Education Network. They deal with dozens of vendors, so I probably can pm some names for you to contact.

N2IT

wolverene13 wrote: »

My company just bought Qwest a few months ago and I was just wondering what to expect as far as the way Qwest does things. Are they a pain to deal with, or is it smooth sailing? I work on WAN circuits in a NOC (routing, switching, etc.) so I'm going to have to deal with the Qwest side of the house on a regular basis, I presume. Just curious as to what people's experience with Qwest is like.

I do LAN and WAN support over the whole CONUS and never had to much of an issue with them. You do get fiber cuts from time to time and other problems, but most of the time it's our equipment.

it_consultant

I work in Colorado, all the cabling is Qwest so no matter who we buy from we are riding there coattails. The circuits seem to be always up which is nice, but they haven't brought metro ethernet, fiber, and other technologies to many places where its sorely needed. I have to tell a lot of people that there only option is to bundle 1.544 full Ts to get faster internet even though a mile away 50 up/down is available for the same price as 7 up/down they are getting. Reason, Qwest doesn't feel like dragging cable.

cablegod

Had 'em 10 years ago. It was very reliable, but far too over-priced. They still are IMHO. Metro Ethernet can be had for <$10 per mbit up to 100mbps, and <$4 per mbit for GigE, and $1 per mbit to even 60 cents per mbit for 10GigE in most metro markets. Qwest is far higher, for unknown reasons to me. They ain't nothing special to command a price premium. Specialty carriers like Internap, LLN, & Mzima do command premiums, but for a reason. Their peering is a VERY robust and blended well.

wolverene13

cablegod wrote: »

Had 'em 10 years ago. It was very reliable, but far too over-priced. They still are IMHO. Metro Ethernet can be had for <$10 per mbit up to 100mbps, and <$4 per mbit for GigE, and $1 per mbit to even 60 cents per mbit for 10GigE in most metro markets. Qwest is far higher, for unknown reasons to me. They ain't nothing special to command a price premium. Specialty carriers like Internap, LLN, & Mzima do command premiums, but for a reason. Their peering is a VERY robust and blended well.

Wow, those prices you just listed are REALLY cheap. My company (Centurylink - 33 states, used to be the Sprint's local ATM/Frame Relay/Metro-E division until we split off from Sprint and formed Embarq, then were bought out by CenturyTel to form Centurylink) charges about $1000/month for a 5meg Metro-E circuit. It might just be because we're considered a "rural" telco, though (despite being the only carrier in places in populated places like Las Vegas and Fort Meyers). Prices are probably higher just because we run circuits where others won't.

wolverene13

it_consultant wrote: »

I work in Colorado, all the cabling is Qwest so no matter who we buy from we are riding there coattails. The circuits seem to be always up which is nice, but they haven't brought metro ethernet, fiber, and other technologies to many places where its sorely needed. I have to tell a lot of people that there only option is to bundle 1.544 full Ts to get faster internet even though a mile away 50 up/down is available for the same price as 7 up/down they are getting. Reason, Qwest doesn't feel like dragging cable.

You might be in luck then, we run fiber all over the place and have Metro-E available everywhere we have service. Metro-E = $, so I'm sure once we get rolling with integrating Qwest's network with ours, we'll start running fiber out there.

Claymoore

We used them at my old company, going from bundled T1s to DS3 to OC3 and finally to a solution that pretended to be MetroE, but was really an OC3 with an ethernet handoff.

My only complaints are I thought they were overpriced, they didn't have true MetroE in our area, and their datacenters aren't carrier neutral. Otherwise their circuits are reliable - we had two brief outages in 5 years - and our Qwest engineer and sales team worked hard for us. We were moving our office, installing a new VOIP system, and moving our 800 number circuit terminations to our local Qwest datacenter where we were co-located. AT&T's glacial pace could not accomodate our move date, so Qwest issued a RespOrg order, ported our 800 numbers to their circuits, and we had phones when we opened for business. AT&T wasn't ready to take the numbers back until a couple of months later.

wolverene13

Claymoore wrote: »

We used them at my old company, going from bundled T1s to DS3 to OC3 and finally to a solution that pretended to be MetroE, but was really an OC3 with an ethernet handoff.

My only complaints are I thought they were overpriced, they didn't have true MetroE in our area, and their datacenters aren't carrier neutral. Otherwise their circuits are reliable - we had two brief outages in 5 years - and our Qwest engineer and sales team worked hard for us. We were moving our office, installing a new VOIP system, and moving our 800 number circuit terminations to our local Qwest datacenter where we were co-located. AT&T's glacial pace could not accomodate our move date, so Qwest issued a RespOrg order, ported our 800 numbers to their circuits, and we had phones when we opened for business. AT&T wasn't ready to take the numbers back until a couple of months later.

I definitely agree on the AT&T issue. They are quite possibly the worst carrier I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Customer service is abysmal, getting to a real person is virtually impossible (their IVR just takes you in circles until you get frustrated and hang up), and it takes them 12 hours to fix a simple T-1 issue. We have a customer who doesn't even have circuits through us; they use AT&T T-1's, but they actually pay us just to monitor their WAN circuits and open trouble tickets with AT&T just so they don't have to do it themselves. AT&T took so long to fix their issues that the CEO of the customer's company had to have a meeting with the VP of AT&T's Southeastern Division to find out why on Earth they missed the 4 hour break/fix SLA on the last 47 trouble tickets. The average fix time was 10 hours! Just recently they got so fed up with AT&T that they began converting all of their AT&T T-1's to our Metro-E circuits. The only other carrier who comes close to being as bad as AT&T is Verizon. I was told by a guy who used to work for AT&T that both AT&T and Verizon are trying so hard to get out of the WAN business and just sell mobile phone service that they operate on skeleton crews to save money and put little to no effort into WAN stuff because they no longer care about it.

cablegod

wolverene13 wrote: »

I definitely agree on the AT&T issue. They are quite possibly the worst carrier I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Customer service is abysmal, getting to a real person is virtually impossible

You hit the nail on the head. I have 3 fiber rings in my city, and they are one of them. I've had several carriers that used an AFee&Fee loop, and every one had the same issues, and it was due to AFee&Fee's incompetence. I don't buy from providers that use AFee&Fee loops anymore. I canned every one of them. We do ZERO business with AFee&Fee and I intend to keep it that way. I've got links from TWTelecom (Time-Warner), and a local CLEC/Cable TV company at my HQ and I have had ZERO issues since. I used to have outages at LEAST twice a month with any carrier using AT&T loops to get to me. I have had zero since ditching them.

I've got equipment in Atlanta, NYC, Sacramento/SF, London, & Sydney. If you have any questions on the pricing I mentioned, shoot me a PM. I'd be glad to pass along contact info.