Since Qwest is hemorrhaging landline customers at an amazing pace (they lost 259,000 last quarter alone), they're eager to rebrand themselves as a next-generation broadband company via a spiffy new ad campaign. The problem is Qwest is still nursing last-gen copper technology, their "next-gen" ADSL2+ upgrades (when they're available to consumers) offer downstream speeds up to 20Mbps, but upstream speeds limited to a paltry 896kbps.

Speaking to analysts, Qwest COO Tom Richards continues the "have your cake and eat it too" game Qwest is playing with next-generation broadband. With sagging landline revenues and no directly owned wireless operations, Qwest lacks the resources for serious upgrades. Richards pretends their lagging speeds are by choice, telling analysts it's about the "actual experience" and that many customers won't notice slower speeds anyway:You don't have to be a very heavy user to notice that 896kbps is slow for a next-generation "user experience." Qwest is working on line bonding for customers with extra available pairs, but even that's only going to go so far in competition with cable DOCSIS 3.0 deployments. Qwest executives may be busy looking down the road at a possible sale, and the company is already rumored to be shopping its long-haul network.

For now, Qwest has found that it's far less expensive to confuse customers into thinking core network fiber and last-mile fiber are the same thing, advertising their ADSL2+ service as "fiber optic Internet service." Even then, most of their customers remain out of range of these faster services, many regular users in our forums saying they're lucky to get a 3Mbps "user experience" from the carrier.

Skimping on infrastructure and then assuming your customers aren't attentive enough to notice the difference doesn't seem like a long-term recipe for success.