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I must admit that the customer service I got from them wasn't quite stellar, however. I wound up going through the local ILEC, simply because they had actually gotten back to me within a day or two, a month after I had requested information from Northpoint. By the time Northpoint had gotten back to me, my circuit was up and I was cruising along with an awesome local ISP.

I'm generally not an anti-corporatist, but I do hope that they win their suit and put at least a little chink in the evil keiretsu that is Verizon, which appears to have put their offer on the table as a bargaining chip in their labor disputes last summer.

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Hrm, very interesting. When I posted that, www.uswest.com was actually being redirected to www.qwest.com, which has full information on the merger. It seems that it is back to pointing to US West's old homepage again.

However, and interesting thing to check out is the 'About...' link on US West's home page.

Well, I'm going to guess that quite a lot of people care. US West is the primary local phone carrier (basically, the phone monopoly) for 14 states in the Central and Northwestern United States. They also provide Internet access through their USWest.net service, and recently started offering DSL.

If you're lucky enough to live in one of them, they also have a wholly owned subsidiary known as US West TeleChoice which offers cable television and cable modems (TeleChoice Online).

While they do have many problems, I personally don't think of them as quite the worst phone company around. There are many who are in fact much worse (BellSouth comes to mind).

Either way, this is a *very* big thing, because US West and Qwest aren't just merging. US West is being bought by Qwest. This will have a major impact on a whole lot of people, both for their local phone service, and more.

I will admit that I'm slightly biased here, as I do cable modem installations for US West TeleChoice Online. However, I'm also very excited here. You see, TeleChoice has been rejoicing over this buy-out for a while now. Qwest is not a phone company, their an Internet service oriented company. Therefore, this buying of US West is primarily to give them access to US West's phone subscriber base to start a major roll out of High Speed Internet Access.

That's right, Qwest is most likely going to be pumping out some major advances in high speed access. I expect we'll be seeing VDSL as soon as it is technically feasible (as in Very Soon (tm)).

I saw a few posts, along with the mention at the top where the story is posted, about who will be in control of the new company. Well, ease your fears, the control goes to Qwest. Again, this merger is Qwest buying US West, so they will be primarily in control. In fact, if you go to US West's homepage (www.uswest.com) you'll see that it's no longer US West's homepage. Instead, you are now looking at Qwest's homepage!

Actually, you're not quite correct. Qwest hasn't sold out, they've bought out. They are the ones in control of the new Qwest-US West corporation.

Check out US West's Home Page and you'll see it very prominently shown that they are now Qwest.

aaah, but you're forgetting, according to USWest "Life's better here." Which has a whole lot more to do with the Rockies than the phone service.

--

Mmmm .. tasty.

I'd also throw in Adobe InDesign. I already have Photoshop and Illustrator. on my NT machine, but I'd need Mac versions of those, too, if someone were kind enough to give me a G4. Oh, and one of those Wacom tablets, preferably the 12 by 18 one. Um, and maybe DSL service.

I am not greedy! You take that back.

Choice TV and OnLine - Developed to compete head-on with the cable companies, U S WEST's Choice TV[VDSL] and OnLine represents the nation's first and only full-scale rollout of integrated digital TV and online services using VDSL technology.

The telcos are going to use their existing infrastructure to compete with the cable companies. The system isn't designed to give every person in America 60Mbps internet access, as others had saig, the existing backbone isn't fast enough, rather, its going to give the telcos instant access into a sector they have traditionally stayed out of. Competition, yummy.

Peter Pawlowski

My new ISP uses Solaris and Linux internally, so it's not hard to find a geek there who can help me out. This is an advantage of dealing with a small ISP. I signed up with them for my sDSL Service, and they were kind enough to hook me up with dialup while my DSL was delayed at the switch. This was good, because my former ISP (one of those 3 NT boxes and a terminal server in a rack sorts of ISPs) couldn't seem to make reverse DNS function consistently... and my 6 month contract was up.

My new ISP is even going so far as to set up the static address block that I requested, on my dialup, so I can just hop over to the DSL when it becomes available. And they use Linux.

No US West has NOT done this to all of it's customers. The service you describe above is a "lower" priced solution for people that do not need an ALWAYS ON connection.

It's called MegaBit 256 Select..

The always on service is still available.

I personally received a letter from US West advertising this "PPP" style solution at about 1/2 the price of the regular ALWAYS ON service.

Ex-Nt-User

No US West has NOT done this to all of it's customers. The service you describe above is a "lower" priced solution for people that do not need an ALWAYS ON connection.

It's called MegaBit 256 Select..

The always on service is still available.

I personally received a letter from US West advertising this "PPP" style solution at about 1/2 the price of the regular ALWAYS ON service.

Ex-Nt-User

There is a wireless coop in its infancy out here in Northern Colorado. Apparently, with a decent gain antenna, you can stretch those devices into a metropolitan area network.
They are using the 11Mb/s AeroNet devices, but I fear they may be stretching things a little too much.
On another note, two local ISPs here are sharing a NNTP server through a 1Mb/s link. It is running line-of-site between their two buildings, and works great -- it was much cheaper than buying a T1 line from US West, too.

But what do I know... I'm still impressed that I can bounce 1200 baud packets over the Rocky Mountains...

--N0ZAP