">By Jeff Smith, News Staff Writer

Qwest Communications Inc., which has been scraping for every penny during the recession, hurt its own cause by failing to bill 64,000 customers in Colorado and Wyoming for their dial-up and high-speed Internet service since November.

The Denver-based telecommunications company on Tuesday blamed the mistake on a computer processing error. A company official said Qwest hadn't yet determined how much money it failed to collect. But based on Qwest's figures of how many customers were affected and for how long, the uncollected amount likely totals millions of dollars.

"We've caught the error and we're notifying customers and then issuing a bill with the charges," said Qwest spokeswoman Marilyn Bromberg. She said the company will work with customers to extend the payment schedule and will waive late payments.

Qwest has been running a program to migrate residential Internet customers from Qwest.net to MSN. Bromberg estimated 19,000 of the 64,000 customers affected by the billing mistake were under a promotional MSN offer at the time and may not owe anything.

"We don't know the (total) dollar figure; we're focused right now on making sure the problem is fixed and aggressively auto-dialing (the customers) to let them know we're going to make a change in the bill," Bromberg said.

Internet service from Qwest/MSN ranges from $18.95 a month for a discounted dial-up service, to $49.95 a month for the highest level of DSL.

This isn't the first time Qwest, which acquired U S West in mid-2000, has had billing problems.

Last summer, Qwest Wireless acknowledged that billing mistakes had affected nearly 10 percent of the company's 1 million cellphone customers. Some cellular customers were billed up to $600 a minute, while others weren't billed at all.

"Billing seems to be a problem in general," said Dian Callaghan of the Colorado Office of Consumer Counsel, a utility watchdog.

Bromberg said no customers lost service because of the latest billing problem, but computer consultant Steven Gray of Golden begged to differ.

Gray, who runs a business out of his home called Essential Software Solutions, said his 3-year-old dial-up Internet access service was cut off without warning Feb. 20.

He said the first technician he talked to that day said Qwest had run a program that had disabled thousands of accounts that weren't being billed.

"I was unaware that Internet access had not been included in my monthly statement," Gray said. He said he believes he hasn't been billed since April 2000.

Gray said he has spent hours on the telephone since last week trying to get his service restored. As of Tuesday, he had re-installed the service but couldn't access the 165 e-mails sent to him in the meantime.

He said he doesn't know if clients have tried to contact him, or what is happening with business proposals he has sent out.

"No one ever told me when they got me to sign up for service that I would be treated like a second-class citizen and have the profitability of my business threatened by their indifference," Gray said.

Rocky Mountain News

-- Anonymous, February 27, 2002