The Dude has an arrangement with his employer that after he completes an “on-call” cycle, he works from home the following day. It’s a nice informal little perk, a way to recognize that work is intruding on your personal life. Of course, working from home means just that, working– which in The Dude’s line of work means access to Ye Olde Informatik Oxtrail. It doesn’t have to be fast access necessarily, just access, so for many years Casa del The Dude has puttered along using Qwest as a ADSL provider to a well respected local ISP. The net result is that email, DNS, etc., is provided by the local ISP, and the line provisioning, etc., was handled by Qwest. It’s been a good arrangement, as the local ISP also has a dedicated Qwest liaison on staff so for those things that they couldn’t take care of on their end they could open a ticket directly, which meant that The Dude didn’t ever have to deal with Qwest’s tech support. Several months ago, the AKO complained that the DSL was starting to drop for short periods during the day, and then come back up. Usually by the time that The Dude came home from work it would recover, and on any residential broadband service, you have to expect some short outages (sad but true). Unfortunately, over the following weeks the outages become more and more frequent, until it got to the point that The Dude opened a support ticket with the ISP and Qwest, wondering if the five plus year old el-cheapo modem was giving up the ghost, or if a previous issue of vegetation infesting the lines had recurred. Several hours of troubleshooting, and The Dude had a brand new spiffy modem that he was assured would fix the problem. The outages seemed to stop for a bit, but then returned with a vengeance. At this point, The Dude is a bit perturbed, since he has just completed shelling out some cash for the new modem, and it didn’t fix the problem. That alone would be bad, but with the guarantee that “it would fix the problem”, there now are trust issues with those who he’s been trusting to ‘work the issue’. The ticket was reopened, and this time the ISP said that the issue must be on Qwest’s side, since everything that the ISP is responsible for has been ruled out by this point. sigh After the ISP washing their hands of the issue, The Dude started navigating the foreign based call centers and phone trees, and persevered in insisting that a line technician be sent out to the neighborhood to diagnose the issue. To be honest, we were pretty convinced that it was grape vines growing into the phone line, or something like that since it was something we’ve seen before in our neighborhood. The technician shows up, spends five minutes walking the lines in the neighborhood, and then knocks on the door. He asks if he can hook up his line tester directly to our phone lines to test a suspicion. “Spectrum interference and crosstalk” is the authoritative diagnosis. The technician then explained to The Dude’s raised eyebrow how Qwest has been rolling out a new Fiber Optics to the Neighborhood service, and how they’ve been seeing degradation of the existing DSL service where it is deployed. Say what?? The technician then noted that if Casa del The Dude was switched on to the new service, it would fix the issue. Oh, but you can’t keep your existing ISP, because Qwest isn’t allowing other ISPs on the new fiber optic network. WTF??? So… the gist at this point is that if The Dude wants DSL at all, he has to change ISPs to Qwest, but “they aren’t forcing anyone to do that”. A hint: