What quality of lines has Qwest provided?

Everyone has heard horror stories of ILECs provisioning poor quality lines to competing DSL providers, and horror stories of DSL providers having to dispatch two, three, or more times to troubleshoot a newly provisioned line to try to get the DSL to work. Frankly, we weren't too worried about this. Summit County is a small county and everybody knows everybody else. We know all the Qwest employees in our county and they know us. We figured the local Qwest employees would do their level best to provide our lines.

And indeed that's the way it turned out. The lines provisioned by the local Qwest people nearly all fired up with good DSL links on the first try.

One house we had trouble with. The local Qwest people tried one spare pair after another, trying to give us a good connection. Finally we did a joint meet at the subscriber's house, and tried connecting the DSL modem right at the pedestal. It linked without any difficulty. This told us it was a bad drop to the house. The Qwest engineer worked on the drop, and eventually a good drop pair was found. The DSL service to the house now works like a charm.

Each DSL port reports what is called a "noise margin" which needs to be higher than ten decibels. All of our ports are seeing noise margins of 18 decibels or higher, which is quite good. It means our circuits are not too noisy. For all but two of the homes, we are able to get a good DSL link at 1.5M bits per second. For the remaining two homes we are able to link at 1M bits per second.