Qwest is broke...

...And I was able to do more to fix the issues they introduced than all of their tech support. This is a rant, so be warned! To cut to the chase, we were having problems with our phone service, can during one of many calls, they told us that we could upgrade to faster internet for less, and they gave us a number to call to get it. We called and were told that it wasn't available in our area. On another call on account of our phone, we were again told that we could get faster for less. We told them what had happened when we called, and he said if we'd wait, he'd check again to make sure. He came back, said it was available, and if we wanted it, he'd put the order in himself. We asked if it'd work with our router, and he said it would, so we did it, and he told us that a new modem would be on the way, and not to plug it in until thursday after 5pm. Well, wednesday at about 11pm, our current internet quit working. So at a little after 5, we plugged in the new modem, and it wouldn't connect. After some almost an hour with tech support, they said we needed to connect the modem directly to the computer, and not the router, and to run the software that came with the modem. That then got the modem to connect, and after plugging the router back in, we had some internet, but email didn't work. Another call and they told us that they hadn't used the type of email we were using in a long time, but until wednesday night, we had been using it just fine!. To shorten this rant, most of our computers would not connect to the internet, unless they were given a manual ip address. A week later, after many calls to Qwest, with no help, I was poking around in the modem configs, I figured out why, the modem was a router too, and it was trying to assign ip addresses too, in the same range our router was. So after reconfiguring the modem and router to different ranges, wham, supper fast internet! But the email still didn't work, and neither did anything they told us to do. My dad figured out that it didn't work with Outlook, any version we had, on his desktop, or laptop. But he had linux on his laptop too, and with Eclipse in linux, it worked fine!?! So we know its some Windows issue of some kind. Well, he has a gmail account, and I asked if Outlook would get his gmail, and he said he hadn't tried it yet. So I showed him how to get it, and there have been no problems getting and sending gmail. So we set gmail up to get mail from his old email, and then we get it from gmail, and all is well. In time he'll just quit checking his old email from Qwest and be on our way. With all the lame customer service we've had with Qwest, and other stories I've heard, I'm surprised that they are still a main player in services. Rant over, and by the way, welcome to 2008!