Miller Zell  

Why Qwest

"Qwest came onto our radar through a carrier reseller here in Atlanta; they put us in touch with the Qwest representative and they came out for a site visit, sat down, and we defined everything we had. Like I said previously, in the RFP we said 'This is exactly what we need for these sites; here are all your addresses; here are all your exchanges-go nuts.' And I think it was probably-it may have been six to seven business days later, we had an answer and we had a proposal from Qwest. That's how they came into the picture-absolutely out of nowhere.

The first major thing was the ability to have more bandwidth for less cost. That was a big selling point for us is that-to give you an example of this, we had a previous carrier quote us a fractional DS3 for one of our sites; it was a substantial amount of money. Qwest came in and gave us a full DS3 for about 600 bucks less a month than what that carrier quoted us. So that's a substantial cost savings for a business our size. I mean, we're a very medium-sized business, and that much of a savings for us is a big-it was part of the decision.

The ability to run QoS over international borders-that seemed to be a very big sticking point with them. They'd guarantee me certainly latency into Canada and three months after we were gonna go live with the MPLS implementation, we were gonna roll out Cisco voice over IP, and so it was just like one piece of the puzzle, second piece of the puzzle, move down the road."

Implementation/installation

"The implementation was five sites in one day. We literally did a forklift implementation; we yanked out the legacy frame relay stuff, shut it off; previous to the weekend, we sent the routers out to the remote sites and essentially turned them on, and they were all pre-configured and ready to go. It was as painless as an implementation could be of this size. You know, you're always gonna have those little glitches, unforeseen issues, that happen during the day, but the issues that we did have resolved--the issues that we did have were resolved pretty quick, and implementation went very smooth because Qwest had really good resources in their network operation center for us to use. They especially had very good resources with regard to the international circuits because where were some specialists that were in the NOC that did nothing but Canada, and so you could get on the phone with these people and got to know them by name and say 'Hey listen, it's doing this and it should do this.' And they said 'It's no problem.' So that was the implementation--it was one day, about six hours."

Customer Service

"Experience with the NOC has been fantastic. I don't think, in dealing-as a network administrator, I don't think I've ever dealt with a NOC that has as much knowledge as the Qwest guys do. It's been impressive that you call and you get the same five or six people if you have an issue to resolve, and they're very knowledgeable and they're very fast. Changes to something like a DNS entry or something like that are said to take somewhere between 24 hours, but I've never had one take more than 15 to 20 minutes-so excellent, excellent resolution time."