Bear in mind that the financial situation at Qwest is bad. They are getting ready to take an estimated $20 to $30 billion writeoff on accounting restatements (mostly of "goodwill") and will probably be sanctioned by the SEC, as indicated in wire stories today. http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2002/04/02/qwest/index.html Their Portland office is across the street from me, and my phone and DSL is dependent on them of course, so this is of direct concern in my case! I should mention that despite its deserved reputation for greedy management (whether as Pacific Northwest Bell, U S West or now Qwest), ops has generally been pretty good and the retail (consumer/ small business) DSL service, from my personal experience, is top notch. (Of course, they run it on FreeBSD so that should tell you something :) We certainly know from experience that a major financial upheaval can affect operations at least indirectly (loss of management attention, budget cuts, deferred maintenance, cutbacks in monitoring and response systems, etc.). On the other hand, it's not a good idea to overreact to news like this. So I would proceed with due caution concerning Qwest transit. As a wise person once said, don't put all your routes in one pipe. Fred
At 04:36 PM 4/2/02 -0800, you wrote:
Bear in mind that the financial situation at Qwest is bad.
Isn't that partially due to deals with Enron on which they misrepresented sales numbers?
We certainly know from experience that a major financial upheaval can affect operations at least indirectly (loss of management attention, budget cuts, deferred maintenance, cutbacks in monitoring and response systems, etc.). On the other hand, it's not a good idea to overreact to news like this. So I would proceed with due caution concerning Qwest transit. As a wise person once said, don't put all your routes in one pipe.
I wouldn't touch Qwest, based on the Enron issue, if nothing else. -- Steve Sobol, Proud Native of the Great Frozen City of Cleveland, Ohio http://www.Cleveland.OH.US/ http://www.TravelCleveland.com/ http://www.LakeCountyOhio.org/ (Where the Snow is Cold but our Hearts Aren't!) CTO, JustThe.net LLC, Mentor On The Lake, Lake County, OH http://JustThe.net/
On Wed, 3 Apr 2002, Steve Sobol wrote:
I wouldn't touch Qwest, based on the Enron issue, if nothing else.
I am pretty sure you can make a case that other Tier1s did the same thing. This isnt unique to Qwest or Enron. Christian --------- i am me, i dont write/speak for them
Bear in mind that the financial situation at Qwest is bad.
Isn't that partially due to deals with Enron on which they misrepresented sales numbers?
Partially, but not primarily. The lead front page article in the Wednesday WSJ is about how badly mismanaged Qwest is. The gist of it is that US West was a sleepy RBOC with mediocre management, then Qwest which was what one might call a dot.fiber bubble company bought US West with fluffy puffy stock, then its incredibly arrogant and not very skillful management ran the company into the ground. If you don't get the Journal, the online edition allows me to mail copies of articles to individuals, so write me if you want a copy. -- John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
On 4 Apr 2002, John R. Levine wrote:
Partially, but not primarily. The lead front page article in the Wednesday WSJ is about how badly mismanaged Qwest is. The gist of it is that US West was a sleepy RBOC with mediocre management, then Qwest which was what one might call a dot.fiber bubble company bought US West with fluffy puffy stock, then its incredibly arrogant and not very skillful management ran the company into the ground.
I didn't see the WSJ article, but as a non-trivial Qwest Customer I can attest to the fact that there are *serious* management issues within the US West half of Qwest. They were bad before qwest took them over. I hoped Qwest would have fixed things. Now they're worse. I've been trying to get a quote for a PVC on an ATM circuit from them for 6 months now.. Customer service is going downhill. They're laying off the competent employees. They're reorganizing every week. In the last year or so I've had at least 6 sales reps. Just as we get them started on our issues they get changed. We can't talk to anyone but our reps because we're large enough that we're "too important of a customer" and they want us only to go through our sales engineer. We have billing issues almost 2 years old which haven't been taken of. We have circuits which were requested to be disconnected which still are active and being billed. We have a hunt group at one site which they've been trying to fix the hunting on (or at least SAYING They are trying to fix the hunt on) for at least 4 months now. And on and on and on and on. We had a conference call with our new sales rep and a couple of other people such as billing specialists, etc. It took us well over an hour just to go through all the pending stuff. We will see if they actually get anything done. I've told their management that they have something seriously broken internally that they need to fix, and they have acknowledged it. I just suspect that Qwest management trying to fix what is broken with Qwest is kinda like someone who doesn't even know how to turn on a computer trying to fix a router. As a final insult, Qwest is trying to convince the FCC to give them LATA relief (which would be a mixed blessing for us), because "they are getting beat up by the competition". I say, show me ANYONE who is competing with you and we'll switch tomorrow. - Forrest W. Christian (forrestc@imach.com) AC7DE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Innovation Machine Ltd. P.O. Box 5749 http://www.imach.com/ Helena, MT 59604 Home of PacketFlux Technogies and BackupDNS.com (406)-442-6648 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Protect your personal freedoms - visit http://www.lp.org/
Please send a copy .... --On Thursday, 04 April 2002 01:45 -0500 "John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Bear in mind that the financial situation at Qwest is bad.
Isn't that partially due to deals with Enron on which they misrepresented sales numbers?
Partially, but not primarily. The lead front page article in the Wednesday WSJ is about how badly mismanaged Qwest is. The gist of it is that US West was a sleepy RBOC with mediocre management, then Qwest which was what one might call a dot.fiber bubble company bought US West with fluffy puffy stock, then its incredibly arrogant and not very skillful management ran the company into the ground.
If you don't get the Journal, the online edition allows me to mail copies of articles to individuals, so write me if you want a copy.
-- John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
-- Joseph T. Klein +1 414 628 3380 Senior Network Engineer jtk@titania.net Adelphia Business Solutions jtk@adelphiacom.net "... the true value of the Internet is its connectedness ..." -- John W. Stewart III
I'd appreciate a copy as well... At 01:45 4/4/02 -0500, you wrote:
Bear in mind that the financial situation at Qwest is bad.
Isn't that partially due to deals with Enron on which they misrepresented sales numbers?
Partially, but not primarily. The lead front page article in the Wednesday WSJ is about how badly mismanaged Qwest is. The gist of it is that US West was a sleepy RBOC with mediocre management, then Qwest which was what one might call a dot.fiber bubble company bought US West with fluffy puffy stock, then its incredibly arrogant and not very skillful management ran the company into the ground.
If you don't get the Journal, the online edition allows me to mail copies of articles to individuals, so write me if you want a copy.
-- John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
participants (7)
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blitz -
Christian Nielsen -
Forrest W. Christian -
Fred Heutte -
johnl＠iecc.com -
Joseph T. Klein -
Steve Sobol