Dixon Hughes  

Business Need

"My firm sends and receives a very large volume of e-mail on any given day; the Internet is our connection to the rest of the world. Our CPAs use e-mail, in some cases, as a primary communications method with their clients; in that way, Internet access is absolutely critical.

Other things--we are a CPA firm, so we use the Internet for electronic tax filings; that happens more than once a year, so Internet availability is critical for being able to electronically file tax returns and other reports. We needed a super-reliable dedicated Internet solution that was available in all of the locations where we do business.

We do business in several different states and approximately 25 individual cities at this point. We needed this to be a single-vendor--and cost was an issue, but not a primary concern for us in this project.

If we had continued with our legacy solution setup, we would have had limited opportunities for growth and our expenses would have been greater. We had run out of capacity and any further growth, any effort to centralize services in our two data centers, would have been hampered by the insufficient bandwidth of our legacy network."

Why Qwest

"We liked the demonstrated reliability of the Qwest network; that was the single greatest factor for us in choosing Qwest. Universal availability motivated us also--the fact that we could choose one vendor for the dedicated IP Internet access in every office in our enterprise.

Also, we purchase a relatively large number of voice services from Qwest in addition to the dedicated Internet access, and we were able to leverage our volume to drive our prices down."

Customer Service

"In the six months that we have had Internet service through Qwest, we have not experienced any downtime or any other technical issues, so unfortunately I can't speak a lot about the customer service or the problem resolution--but I'm ecstatic about the results that we've had.

In addition, we have always found the Qwest customer service people on the voice side to be very responsive, thorough, and professional. The very few issues that we've had on the voice side have always been resolved quickly and professionally."