a QWEST story - long and off-topic. 

Some of you may recall that a little while ago I wrote the list looking for
help on why my Cisco 675 router would only train at 256K, despite lots of
tweaking and tuning, and a rock-solid line quality of 45 dB. Since nearly
everybody on this list that has QWEST seemed to be getting 640K down with
signal strengths as low as 24 dB, I thought I was getting QWERSTed.

Adam Maloney suggested that someone at USWEST/QWEST had forgotten to remove
a 256k bandwidth cap on the router at the CO, and that I needed to find the
right person to talk with at QWEST to flip the switch.

That started a long and arduous journey of many phone calls, bouncing
between customer support and sales. It was hard breaking through the first-
and second-defense layers of tech support excuses and canned answers. Once I
did that, and got them to understand the problem, they couldn't help me.
Their policy is that the techs are only allowed to file a trouble ticket if
the delivered service is less than 256K - which is the rate I'm paying for.
Ergo, not a problem.

Who could help me, then, I ask?. "Customer service". Now *these* guys were
less than helpful. None understood the concept of getting 640k down while
only paying for 256K. Most offered to sell me 640K service, or refer me back
to customer support. After many false starts I did talk with one customer
rep who understood the whole deal immediately, and promised a fix in a week,
but it never came about. Time passes. Subsequent calls to Qwest showed no
record of that conversation, and they were beginning to treat me like I was
some kind of scammer.

After four weeks of this, I was ready to switch to cable. Time for a new
tack. As a last-ditch effort I wrote a letter to the PUC explaining the
situation and my trials at getting an answer to the question "Why can't I
get 640K service, despite great line quality?".  Two days after I sent the
letter I get a message on my machine from a female bureaucrat at Qwest
Executive Offices in Colorado, dripping with condescension, telling me that
she checked out my case and that I was getting what I was paying for and
there is no problem on the line, and why don't you just stop your whining ways.

We played phone tag for the next day or two, but I finally got a chance to
put my case to her. She wasn't defensive, I was courteous but assertive. She
said she'd check into it. Well, today, she called back to tell me that there
was indeed an unnecessary 256k cap on my download speed, and she had had it
removed. Yeehah! Persistent really does work - and, apparently, so does a
letter to the PUC.

Thanks to Adam Maloney, Scott Dier, Tom Veldhouse, Bill Layer, Mike Vieths,
and Bob Tannerfor all the help and suggestions. 

Ironically, all this hassle caused me to start investigating cable, and it
appears that can get far better service for $25 less per month. Hmmm....