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Permalink Reply by Randy on January 13, 2008 at 4:26pm

This discussing can be found in the archives, but here was my reply then:

My 4 cents... I lived in Rio Rancho a few years ago and the first broadband available was Comcast. (I think I was the second person in the city with it when I had to help the installer get it working) It was great at the time and was about 2MB connection. So I dropped Qwest as I was paying $48/month for a dial tone. Switched to Vonage and entered mistake number 1. Gee, what do you do when the cable goes out? Call Comcast. Ooops. How can I do that when my phone runs through the cable service? Quite inconvenient to run to the neighbor to call only to be put on hold for service for an extra half an hour due to my not calling from the phone number on my account records! Oh well, the cable only went out once or twice a month, so that was only a minor inconvenience. Just glad I didn't have to call 911 during a storm or something when I didn't have service. OK, moved on to ABQ in 2005. Picked up Comcast again with a super-dee-dooper package for $140/month that included ALL cable channels for the cable-addicted family and high speed (8MB) internet for the broadband addicted me... This was supposed to be good for a year and then the fixed price would go away. (OK, I will drop ALL channels and restrict the family when it happens) So, a year later I get a bill for $295/month. First thought? I didn't pay my bill in time for it to credit on my account. No, that wasn't it. My bill went up to $295/month. So I call and complain as ususal. They offer to drop it back to BASIC cable with about 16 channel and drop my internet back to about 256K for the low-low price of $150/month. Call Qwest on my overpriced Vonage/Comcast line (since it did work at the time) and request a quote for service. Bundle time. Phone service, DSL (fixed price for life $26) and DirecTV with $50/month bundle for a total of $120/Month. Cool, when can you install? About 2 weeks... Sad Wait 3 weeks and call to find out my install status. Just in time to get my next $298 bill from Comcast (Price must have been set to increase $3/month for those of us without a checking account balance concern) Qwest calls and tells me they will be there tomorrow to install and someone needs to be home from 12-5. OK, I finally get to dump Comcast. Waiting patiently at 7PM the next night for the installer to show up, I get worried. Call Qwest to find out they scheduled it for the following day and show a record of me being called to report that. Huh? I don't recall that phone call. Must have talked to my neighbor in Rio Rancho or something... So, I take off the next day and get a call from the installer at about 5:30 to let me know he is running late. Can we reschedule for tomorrow? NO! So he show up at 10AM the next day anyway. Wonders why no one is home to let him in. So I go home, let him in an watch as he spent no less than 2 hours in his service vehicle picking his nose and talking on the cell phone. (Yes, he could do both at the same time.) Called to report the quality of person coming to install my service (two days late and running way to slow to get it done in 4 hours.) He can't get the phone service working cause Vonage hasn't released the line yet. It will work in the morning was his excuse. Try it the next morning and nothing. So a call goes into Qwest through my Comcast/Vonage line that still works. They told me I had to call Vonage to get them to release the line. Boy, they don't want to lose a customer so it took me 4 calls to get through to someone that must have been the Vice President or something that wanted to know why I was switching service. So I convinced them to release the line. Perfect. The next day my Qwest line fires up and all is well. The installer failed to clean up after a shoddy install job, so I complained about having to pay $60 for the phone jack installs on my 40 year old house. But the DirecTV hasn't been installed yet and I wonder why. I call Qwest, who tells me I had to call DirecTV myself to setup the install date. That will only be another week, but I have to make sure I am home from 12-5 next Thursday. He came on Monday, but who cares at this point? I only had to use 5 days of vacation to make sure I could stay home alone... Next month, I get a $150 bill from Comcast, a $29 bill from Vonage and wonder why? Comcast was a post payment for previous service. Pay up and shut up and hope it goes away kind of thing. Vonage, I ignore as I am sure the billing department just hasn't caught up yet. Next month, I get a Vonage bill for $64 for last month, this month and late fee. So I call them and they tell me I never cancelled my service. I explained that I called to release the line to which they replied I needed to call the disconnect office as well to cancel my service. No pay the bill and do it quick is what I was told. So I reported them to the AG office who got me out of the bill due to their stupidity.

2007--- Qwest works fine. Service has only been interrupted once on the phone, 3 times on the internet and 4 or 5 times on the DirecTV. But at least I can call when my TV goes out!

Advice: Move to Moriarty so you don't have enough time to watch TV, play on the internet and your cell phone service won't work. You will live such a peaceful life, you won't even have to worry about what is posted on the DCF forums. (Sorry, that last one would be the only loss to one's personal satisfaction)

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Permalink Reply by killbox on January 14, 2008 at 1:53am

Qwest will sell you standalone DSL, Its what i have now, dsl on the phone line but no dialtone. It does cost you about $5 more than the price of dsl if you are adding it onto a voice line (i assume most of that is the admin cost of printing mailing you the bill.)

You could even pick a local ISP Albuquerque has a fair number of them. (im biased seeing as how i work with one of them)

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Permalink Reply by killbox on January 14, 2008 at 9:52am

Tnik of it as qwest discounts the dsl if you use msn/live, because they are subsidizing your connection by sniffing(spying on) your traffic and using your web searches to sell marketing information about you. (something the small local guys would never do)

They also can get by with nearly free ISP providing because all the tech-support has been outsourced to India, so have fun when you have a problem.

Its just like the dilemma of buying from a local brick & mortar store vs buying online, you can almost always get the products cheaper online somewhere but when you buy local you are contributing to a local paycheck/job.

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Permalink Reply by Dr Dan on January 13, 2008 at 8:43pm

Wow Randy
That is some story, I'm staying with dial up, but my comcast is $93.00, ast I have no life, don't have a cell yet. My girlfriend got cricket and she loves it but has problem with the charger and replaced it once and there are no refunds or replacements on chargers. She has the basic so no voice mail

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Permalink Reply by vashti on January 13, 2008 at 9:10pm

We use Qwest Silver, with no land line. We have a locked in for life price - high speed internet for $36.99/month. We purchased the wireless modem from them for $100.00, with no other set up fees. We don't do cable TV and have no landline (all cells, crazy times), so this was the best deal for us. We had a bit of a hiccup with getting the service hooked up - we were given one set up date, and got another one altogether. To make it right, Qwest gave us a month free service (at our prompting). They do offer bundled services if you do the TV/phone thing, and offer locked in prices there as well. In my research, Comcast offered good prices to start but after a year those prices skyrocket. To date, we haven't had any problems with service. Best of luck with your adventures in moving.

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Permalink Reply by hettie on May 11, 2009 at 5:49pm

be very careful about that "price for life." in order to qualify, you agree to a 2 year "contract" (although qwest doesn't send you any actual contract which details your obligations or the service they provide). the price for life works fine until you attempt to make service changes, move, etc. after that 2 years is up. then your price is no longer "for life" but expired at the end of that two years and you have to wrestle with qwest about billing. they told me I could have re-upped at the end of the two years by going online, but I only learned this way after the fact. if you don't make any changes to your account, you shouldn't have a problem. I think they figure they'll upsell you at some point before the two years is up, so "price for life" doesn't actually have to mean anything. (I'm a little bitter, as I've been on the phone with qwest a lot in the last two months.)

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Permalink Reply by misterhinkydink on January 14, 2008 at 8:14am

I've had Earthlink DSL provisioned through Covad for the past 7 years and have been very happy with the service. For TV I've had DrecTV for 10 which I've also been happy with.

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Permalink Reply by Kelly on January 14, 2008 at 9:16am

We've had Comcast cable and internet, for 2 years. We made the switch from Qwest DSL/phone when Vonage arrived. We have had few, if any problems with cable up/down. Yes, during times that the cable in down (again, for us, very rare), the phone is also down. But considering what a cluster of poor customer service, shoddy infrastructure and perpetual rate hikes/tax increases that Qwest was, we're infinitely happier with Comcast/Vonage.

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Permalink Reply by Sarah on January 14, 2008 at 11:28am

My boyfriend and I have Comcast high speed wireless and digital cable. We pay $100/month. We don't have a landline or have to have a landline for everything to work. We never have any trouble with either service.

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Permalink Reply by Neonnoodle on January 14, 2008 at 1:18pm

Thanks for all the responses! I've had Qwest DSL before and I found their customer support to be a little lacking. I might end up with the Comcast package again, mostly out of familiarity. Cricket looks interesting. I'm assuming it's like Clearwire? I tried Clearwire here in Seattle and noticed that the signal strength wasn't consistent, and it was frequently affected by foul weather.

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Permalink Reply by imouse1 on May 15, 2008 at 12:08am

Cricket is okay and they're highly negotiable. I used to work for a delivery company and the Cricket service is great if you're in Albuquerque or you're in Santa Fe. The calls really are unlimited and there are no weird fees and you could literally call everyone you needed to provided your battery would hold out. But those in-between areas and those out-of-town areas might not work so well for you and the signal strength gets a little weird during bad weather. Never could quite explain that but if you're not heavily-dependent on the phone you're probably good to go with Cricket.

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Permalink Reply by Girlmarie on January 14, 2008 at 5:42pm

I don't have cable. I have wireless internet from Desert Wifi in my building. Mine is about $32 a month. I've had it for about three years and like them very much.

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