My experience with Qwest ADSL was good, but only after complaining about 
dropouts and poor service caused them to send out a computer/DSL tech 
rather than the first guy on the list. The first guy was only able to 
say, yup, its weak and noisy, just like I told them. He exhausted his 
limited set of diagnostic methods and scheduled a callback from the next 
higher tier of DSL service tech. The DSL tech had the equipment to look 
at the line, see the levels and noise at my end. He checked the DSLAM 
end, replaced a bad DSLAM card, came back and found it was stronger but 
still had noise and distortion.

He scheduled another service call with a wiring crew to check the 
physical line between the DSLAM and my house. They found and removed 
five "line taps" on the 1/2 mile copper pair between the DSLAM and my 
house. After that, signal levels were much better, signal quality was 
very good, and I never had another lick of problem with the connection 
dropping out.

I don't know if the bad DSLAM output was real or not, or if it was 
caused by operating into a wildly out-of-spec line for a couple years. 
But the root of my problem was the old copper lines that had been 
installed well before 1960. At that time it was common to string a main 
bundle and tap off it for every street branching off the main street. 
These "line taps" act like unterminated transmission lines and cause 
reflections to appear on the main line, which in turn make it harder to 
demodulate the DSL carriers. It is the same problem that occurs when you 
operate a hard drive or floppy drive on the middle connector of a cable 
with no termination at the far end.

Basically, Qwest was trying to save money by having the user install the 
DSL modem as plug-n-play. If you happen to be on a line with "clean 
copper" it probably worked just fine. And even mine worked fairly well, 
I just couldn't reliably hit full speed and had dropouts at various 
times of the day. It was two years before it got bad enough for me to 
complain about it because I didn't know it should be better than it was....

Doug Reed.
N St Paul.