Colorado CLEC Takes Qwest to Court over Interconnection

Qwest Communications International Inc., formerly doing business as US West Inc. in Colorado, apparently isn't holding up its end of a bargain brokered with a CLEC in that state.

SunWest Communications Inc. (www.sunwest.net) of Colorado Springs filed a complaint Aug. 4 in El Paso County District Court in Colorado against Qwest (www.qwest.com) for breach of contract and unfair business practices. SunWest seeks almost $1.65 million that it says Qwest owes it for access charges, as well as unspecified punitive damages.

A Qwest executive told X-Change that the lawsuit is disappointing, but that Qwest hopes to continue working with SunWest in the future. However executives for Qwest, whose merger with US West received federal approval in March, would not comment on the specifics of the case.

But SunWest CEO and President Dan Potter says that the problems SunWest is having with Qwest are placing a financial hardship on the CLEC.

"It has put a serious kink in our expansion plans," Potter told X-Change. "We haven't laid off any employees, but we haven't been able to grow."

Potter alleges that US West breached an interconnection agreement between the two companies by failing to provide switch interconnections in a timely manner, and by failing to make payments required under another agreement.

According to the lawsuit, US West and SunWest inked an agreement in May 1997 specifying US West's obligations to provide service and access lines to SunWest. US West also agreed to pay SunWest for using its access lines while US West completed the necessary work that would enable SunWest to use its own switching equipment for its customers.

Within a month, "US West intentionally and willfully breached [the agreement] and told SunWest that a new agreement would have to be negotiated because the first agreement was too favorable to SunWest and, accordingly, US West would not abide by it," according to the lawsuit. "SunWest, having no choice, entered into a separate agreement in February 1998."

Under the terms of the second agreement, US West was required to pay for SunWest's lost access charges on lines used by its customers until all SunWest customers have been ported over to the SunWest switch, according to the lawsuit.

SunWest says that after "extraordinary delays and numerous missed deadlines, US West finally provided the lines necessary to enable SunWest to begin hooking up its switch in June 2000.

"However, because of US West's delays of 15 months, all SunWest customers have not yet been ported over to the SunWest switch," the lawsuit says.

Under the second interconnection agreement, SunWest also has billed US West every month for the access charges, and says that from February 1998 to December 1999, US West paid the SunWest invoices for all of those charges.

But for charges accrued since Jan. 1, 2000, SunWest says US West has "failed and refused to pay for the access charges."

"Even before we contemplated this legal action, we'd sent letters to US West regarding more than 300 individual customer complaints since June of 1999," Potter says. "Every one of those complaints is the result of US West's failure to comply with its obligations of our interconnection agreement.

"It seems as if we were writing a letter a day to US West, listing the complaints we received that day from disgruntled customers," Potter adds.

George Coon, SunWest's vice president of regulatory and networks, says Qwest is trying to delay and stall local competition.

"We consider US West's actions … predatory in nature," Coon says. "Because of US West's delays, our company has been unable to solicit major commercial accounts in our service area. To make matters worse, US West has unfairly taken advantage of those delays by going after those very same customers and locking them into exclusive contracts."

SunWest seeks a trial in this case, although no date for that has been set yet.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines