War with Qwest
Qwest is at war with my ISP, and on Tuesday and Wednesday I and thousands of others, including 911 services and government offices and numerous small and large businesses, got caught in the crossfire.
You can read the story but I’ll sum it up here: there’s a money dispute and SkyWi (the parent company of my ISP, ZiaNet) took Qwest to court in early December. I’m told they had a restraining order against Qwest disconnecting them, and when that expired and SkyWi hadn’t paid Qwest the disputed money (would you pay money in dispute?), they cut them off. This left all of us civilians without internet abruptly mid-morning Tuesday.
I’m not privy to all the details, but I’ve read all the reports and I talked to people at the ZiaNet offices. At first, when I had less information, I was mad at my ISP. That changed somewhat to sympathy when I heard more of the story. It sure does look like Qwest is trying to put them out of business with this shenanigan. There was probably a breakdown of communication between Qwest and SkiWi as well, no doubt exacerbated by the fact that we were smack in the middle of the holidays.
But I don’t hold my ISP blameless. We weren’t noticed of impending doom at all. The phone message the first day said something about a major outage with no ETA. I assumed that meant a few hours, maybe into the evening. The second day, the phone message said happy holidays, here are our holiday hours. No mention of the trouble, and no update. Then passed straight to “the voice mailbox is full”. The voicemail being full and lines tied up I can understand, but there’s no excuse for not having an informative message.
So I was briefly torn—do I stick it out with them on principle in this war against Qwest or do I find another source of internet. I decided it’s not my problem—my problem is getting internet. So I investigated switching ISPs, and of course with New Years day coming up and thousands of other people scrambling for internet it wasn’t pretty. I have an appointment to be set up by Comcast on Tuesday (out of the frying pan and into the fire). In the meantime, the PRC stepped in and my connection came back on just before the big apple fell in all its time-delay glory. Still, the Comcast deal is about $20/month cheaper and we’re hard up for cash now, and Comcast jumped on the opportunity and was waiving installation fees for ZiaNet customers.
I’ve never been much a fan of Qwest, but this is a new low. Before I would have considered Qwest less evil than Comcast, but now the tables are turned. Still, I will miss the block of 4 public IPs.