Recently, I noticed a line item on my phone bill for “DSL 640k,” which puzzled me, as I was pretty sure the last service upgrade notice I had on my DSL was to 320k. This morning, I found myself with two seconds to rub together, so I called Qwest to find out what the deal was.

Amazingly, the experience was fast, fast, fast and smooth. Apparently my 4-year-old DSL modem is too old to negotiate the linespeed supported by the DSL already laid to the house; so a new modem is on the way and a service upgrade accompanies it, at the same rate as my current bill.

If I understood correctly, the new linespeed’s theoretical max is going to be 1.1Mbps; I did not catch whether this was symmetrical or not.

So, in a week or so… There may be some downtime here.