Medical Resources Inc  

Business Need

"The nature of my company, which is medical imaging, requires good clean bandwidth, meaning low latency and constant availability. The quality of the link provided by our previous carrier, despite implementing QoS on my end and CoS at their end, still the quality of the overall link was still unacceptable. Any attempt by the carrier to resolve this was literally abandoned after several meetings and it got pretty frustrating. We work with doctors and hospitals; any kind of latency can have its negative effects on the business overall. Images are scanned and they are supposed to be made available to the doctor almost immediately so he may look at them and dictate and do reports. Well, it would take almost two hours before that would happen, and that's just totally unacceptable to the doctor.

Also, support is a number one key factor--more important to us than others, you might say. So the overall support offered by the previous carrier was also unacceptable. So one of the major things that I remember is that looking at bandwidth, because of what we do, there is very limited technology that would help me in preserving bandwidth. I was looking at several technologies that would help me remedy that at very low cost; the existing carrier did not support any of those technologies, so that was one of the main pushes that forced me to push the project to replace them quicker than the company I liked proposed to do."

Why Qwest

"I worked with Qwest a few years ago with one of the largest wireless carriers and my personal experience with them, based on what my colleagues told me as well, Qwest would be the best candidate. They met all the constraints. The costs given to us was a huge annual savings that was just absolutely incredible, and the way they presented themselves to my management team was also very professional. They answered all the questions. Another carrier we did consider was Verizon-MCI, but we could tell that the merge was going to be somewhat of a billing issue. I felt, based on what I saw, was they were still going through some growing pains, but we needed a solution now. Qwest fit the bill perfectly. Also, very important is I had the pleasure of meeting one of their regional sales engineering managers, and his technical background speaks for itself. I being what you might call a Ciscohead and him being one, it was very comfortable knowing that there's somebody at the other end I can talk to.

Now from a technology point, Qwest supported all my existing technologies and others I felt would be the best for several of my remote sites--the technologies that my existing carrier was just experimenting with, and I really did need these things very much--especially some of my remote sites required a little bit more than a T1, but not enough to cost justify a T3. Qwest supported what's known as Multilink, which was perfect. What Multilink allows you to do is actually bond T1s, so the savings in hardware--I can basically just stick another what's known as a WIC in an existing router, and for the hardware cost of I guess it's $500 or $600, I can get a 3-meg circuit versus $2,000 or $3,000 for ATM technology, which was perfect for me. Even though they only have maybe four or five people on staff, many of my sites generate enough data to cost justify a 3-meg, even a 4.5-meg link. So when you look at price versus hardware versus savings, it was an excellent solution."

Customer Service

"So far, compared to my previous carrier, I keep saying it's just been refreshing. It's been more than satisfactory. We have had no issues at all involving orders and because of that, I've been able to focus more of my time on any pending projects. My previous carrier--you know, their manner was more like to disown the issue as soon as the opportunity surfaced; they would basically blame it on the customer or blame it on the LEC and just kind of let it go. And it meant constantly following up with tickets and whatnot and basically almost getting into arguments with the support person at the other end, which meant taking up more of my time on things that their support should be responsible for, and all of a sudden I would run out of time and could not really focus on more important projects as much as I wanted to--as much as I should. With Qwest, that's pretty much almost dissolved."