Qwest on the Comeback Trail
Giga Om himself wrote a little piece on how Qwest is buying back just over 10% of their outstanding shares and making a comeback. I certainly hear good things about Qwest “from the inside” having talked with rank-and-file employees. One of my in-laws works for Qwest in addition to the various DSL techs that have come out to my house over the past year.
Qwest is starting to sound like the little ILEC that could. “Little” given the relative size of AT&T and Verizon. And at least around here, really agressively trying to roll out DSL in places it never existed before. Right now, I can only get 1.5 mb DSL and probably won’t get any better until they can fiber-feed the local DSLAM when the cable company can give me 8/1.5. Some people I’ve talked to in my local Linux users group can barely get 256/256, if that, but some of them live in very rural parts of the area.
Certainly in the broadband deployment area, Qwest has an uphill battle to fight and some serious catching up to do compared to the cable guys. Whether or not they will be able to catch up is something that, as a Qwest customer, I will be following very closely.
