Letter to QWest

I just sent the following letter to QWest. I'll let you know if I ever receive a response.

Today I received a flyer from Qwest stating that you were now offering fiber optic internet in my neighborhood with speeds up to 20mbps. Naturally, as a mouth breathing internet nerd I was ecstatic. I recently had to move out of my old neighborhood where I had 50/50mbps fiber optic and it was like living in sweet digital nirvana. Now I'm suffering with Comcrapst "16mpbs" - and I put that in quotes because they have some kind of different, slower, definition of 16mpbs than the rest of reality uses.

Anyway, I called up, credit card in hand to sign up for this new wonderland of digital goodness we call fiber. Turns out you guys were actually offering 40mbit connections in my area! This is like hearing someone you know won the lottery, and then finding out that person is actually you!

Unfortunately I found out the 40mbit connection costs some exorbitant amount of money - I have to sign over my first born and bring the Qwest gods the head of a rare goat only found on a specific mountain in the Himalayas or something. I don't know, I wasn't really paying attention. Anyway, I can handle the 20mbit connection advertised on the flyer for $45/mo. I can handle $45 a month and no goats have to be hurt in the process.

What I found out next shocked me to my very core (jelly filled! mmmm!). The 20mbit connection actually costs $68/mo ... or $75/mo depending on which part of the conversation we're talking about. Every time I asked it seemed to get more expensive. To get the good deal for $45/mo I have to sign up for a phone line.

A phone line?!?! Really!?!?!? What year is this? Who has phone lines anymore? What am I, a cave man? It's like saying "Yea, you can get an internet connection from us but only if you purchase our sharpened stone for scrawling hunting stories on the walls of caves!" It's madness!

Why would you force me to bundle a new service that modern humans would want with something surely from the cro-magnon era that only grandmas and people in 3rd world countries use. And all of this AFTER your salesman tried to sell me cell phone service. Why would I want something that requires archaic copper wiring in my house when I could have something that works anywhere in the country for the same price (plus brain cancer, possibly, but I don't like living in the future!).

Oh, and remember that sweet, sweet nectar of the gods internet connection I told you I had that was 50/50mbit fiber? Well, it was awesome, and it was only $50/mo (no lie). That's like 3x cheaper than yours and I don't have to find a flight to the Himalayas.

So the point of all this is to say that I would love to have your faster Internet, but I can't convince my room mates to pay more for something they don't care about, and none of them even knew what a land line was. One of them said "a land line? Is that how dinosaurs hunted for prey or something?" I don't know, room mate guy, I don't know.

So, all I'm saying is, come up with a different bundle. Preferably something that bundles the internet service with something that people under 30 have at least vaguely heard of and might even want (like, I don't know, TV service or nightly pizza delivery or something). Then, I would love to suckle and the sweet digital teet of Qwest high speed fiber optic internets.