Qwest Asked to Credit Users Over Virus. I've expressed my strong mixed feelings on the issue before, but ultimately it seems like the outage was severe enough that Qwest should give discounts even if it wasn't their "fault", necessarily. I wonder if the virus has caused enough bad PR for Qwest that it threatens to switch their users to cable modems, or if they will in the future if they don't offer some reparations.

I do think Qwest was doing their damnedest to rush repair information to its users as quickly as possible. In addition to putting an informative message at the top of their tech support phone tree and at the front of their web sites, they also sent out unsolicited postal mail describing the problem and the fix, and made unsolicited phone calls to all DSL customers as a check-up.

On the other hand, these little Cisco routers are marketed as self-contained, self-sustaining devices that don't require maintenance. Qwest, Cisco and experienced sysadmins knew about the exploit in the router software for almost a year before this happened, and no effort was made to inform mainstream users and businesses of the vulnerability and how to fix it. Once again, I can't help but think that Qwest is negligent in not offering a known working solution (erasing and replacing the CBOS, then reconfiguring) simply because the support costs are a little high, and instead insisting that our hardware is suffering from some kind of natural disaster and it can't be helped.

By the way, in case I haven't mentioned, Qwest has dropped support for the Cisco 675 in all new installations, so if you have a 675 and you move (like I just did), you'll have to buy a new Cisco 678. I'm still waiting on mine. *sigh* I miss my DSL.