Having had a day or so to ponder the UTOPIA situation after attending that meeting in Roy City with Qwest president for Utah Jerry Fenn, I’ve come to a few conclusions.

Fix-it man

First of all, Mr. Fenn indicated that since he’s taken the helm of Qwest’s Utah operations in September customer service has improved. He mentioned 150 some odd new technical customer service representatives were recently hired at $40-50,000/year salaries to handle DSL issues.

When Brad Peterson and I mentioned that we were aware of ridiculous recent problems with DSL orders, Mr. Fenn demanded that we call him personally and he would see that those problems would be solved immediately.

One particular issue we’ve had to deal with is with a client in Ogden. They ordered DSL about three weeks ago. The DSL service came online the day they had said it would, but it was on the wrong phone line coming into the business. They wanted it on their fax line and it was installed on their voice line.

DSL being DSL, this introduced a lot of noise to their voice line. They installed the Qwest-supplied DSL filters in the RJ11 jacks around their business only to discover the fax line didn’t work anymore. The filters only support one line while the RJ11 telephone jacks support 2 lines.

The client went to Radio Shack and purchased a set of filters which worked with multiple lines. Meanwhile, we contacted Qwest and explained the situation and said that we wanted the DSL service connected with a different ISP than it was currently set up with. Qwest said they would remedy the problem and assigned a new delivery date for the job.

When that date came, the DSL service that was working on the voice line shut off. The ISP we asked Qwest to move the service to said they had not received any turn-up notice from Qwest. A call to Qwest revealed that Qwest hadn’t acted on the order. A new install date was assigned.

Qwest missed the next scheduled install date too.

Finally, Qwest came through on a third install date, but the DSL service was set up with the original ISP and not the ISP we requested. In addition, Qwest reconfigured the DSL modem/router and overwrote all the configuration changes we had made which were necessary for the applications the client was using.

Another call to Qwest resulted in another date.

That date was Wednesday - the day of the meeting I went to in Roy. I told Mr. Fenn the particular Qwest problem I had been dealing with was supposed to be taken care of that day, but I would let him know if it wasn’t. I suspect he thought I was blowing smoke.

Well, this time the DSL service was gone.

Another call to Qwest and we were promised the service would be turned back on within 24 hours.

The client called Qwest to confirm that change order. They were told the change order didn’t exist in Qwest’s system and there was no way anything could be done within 24 hours — the soonest anything could be done would be closer to a week.

We’ve called Mr. Fenn and left him messages and e-mail. It remains to be seen whether or not he’ll come through. One thing is clear, though, from this experience it does not look like things have improved at Qwest. They should change their name back to US West so we can sarcastically call them “US Worst” again.

Demand for UTOPIA

In the Wednesday meeting, Mr. Fenn said UTOPIA’s take rate estimates were ridiculously unrealistic and he said Qwest’s DSL take rates were proof of it. He said, overall, people just don’t care about broadband Internet access.

I’ve thought about that a lot and I think he’s right... if UTOPIA was just about Internet access, but it’s not.

Most Utahns are paying $30-60/mo for basic telephone service depending on how much long distance calling they do and what features (e.g. call waiting, voice mail, etc.) they add to their line, etc. Most Utahns also subscribe to Comcast cable. It’s been a long time since I had cable, but I’m guessing the rates for an average basic cable subscription are around $30-40/mo.

And this is for residents. Businesses, of course, pay more for telephone service.

With UTOPIA in place, a different scenario unfolds. A resident or business in a UTOPIA member city would be able to order phone service from their choice of telephone service providers. They could order a television service package from their choice of television service providers. It’s not unreasonable to guess a switch from Comcast/Qwest to UTOPIA service providers might save a person $40 a month or more.

Qwest may not be seeing the kind of take rates on their DSL products that UTOPIA is forecasting for their service, but Qwest isn’t bundling telephone, television, and broadband Internet into one package.

I think Qwest is making a big mistake to refuse to be a part of UTOPIA.

Another thing Mr. Fenn and his boys brought up in Wednesday’s meeting was a chart which attempted to debunk the argument that Qwest’s telephone rates keep going up. This chart showed the cost for basic telephone service twenty years ago and showed what it would be today if it had tracked the rate of inflation over that time.

This proved, said the Qwest-boys, phone service was cheaper now than it ever was. They used that as a jumping-off point to say, “If it looks more expensive, it’s because of all the taxes and fees the government makes us collect that we didn’t have to collect before.”

It looked good on paper, but there was one big problem with it: technology. Telephone service is driven by technology. You probably couldn’t get call waiting twenty years ago. There was no voice mail service — everyone had those cassette-tape driven answering machines. In addition, the equipment Qwest used to manage their circuit-switching network was a lot more expensive then than it is now.

Fast-forward to today. Almost every facet of telecommunications is automated. The cost to provide services on a phone line like voice mail, call-forwarding, etc. are nearly negligible. They’re standard features on most company PBX systems, for example. Consider also the fact that more people have more phone lines than they did 20 years ago.

A good example of how advances in technology have made telecommunications significantly less expensive is long distance service. Consider how expensive a long-distance call was twenty years ago and compare that to MCI’s neighborhood calling plan now that offers unlimited long-distance calling to other people who have MCI service.

The bottom line is this: Qwest can’t take credit for charging less for telephone service. Technology took care of that and probably warrants an argument that Qwest should charge less.

If and when UTOPIA does get off the ground, I think we’ll see just how much less Qwest can charge to keep customers. Competition is always good for the consumer.