Half Hour With Qwest Technical Support Today

Sick and tired of the inability to get an internet connection, I called Qwest DSL technical support this morning.

I called, got the annoying voice prompts for a couple of minutes, then finally got a woman on the phone. She took my phone number and name and told me she would transfer my call to support.

Ten minutes later, a man came on the phone with a thick accent. Yes, he was a foreigner. He sounded like he was from India. There was a short delay between when I said something and when he responded, so I knew he was a great distance away from me.

The first thing he told me was what Qwest support always tells people: it is probably a problem inside your house. No, it isn't. I explained to him that I tried plugging the modem into three different wall jacks and still had the same problem. He then told me he would need to put me on hold for 3 - 5 minutes while he ran some line tests.

Ten minutes later he came back on the phone. He called me by the wrong name, which gave me the impression that he wasn't running line tests, but was handling other calls while he had me on hold.

During the time he had me on hold, the modem was able to train properly and maintain a SNR margin of 16 - 17. Prior to putting me on hold, it would vary wildly every few seconds from 0 to 18.

When the Qwest support person came back on the line we talked for a few more minutes. I explained that the modem was now able to train, which was consistent with the problem I was having the past few days in which the modem would be unable to train for half-an-hour or longer then train and be able to establish a connection for half-an-hour to an hour before dropping repeatedly again.

He asked me to connect to the internet. I did. Everything seemed to be working fine. He really didn't do anything other than run some line tests, if he actually did that.

I haven't had to call Qwest support for years. But the last time I did they were able to do something to the signal to make it train or not train. This support guy did nothing.

All told I spent over 30 minutes this morning on the phone with Qwest support. Interestingly, the support guy gave me the name of a website that I should go to if I have any trouble. With his acceent, I couldn't understand the URL. But it doesn't matter anyway, because if I can't connect to the internet the last thing I can do is go to a website.