Since Speakeasy was bought by Best Buy and then shuffled off into MegaPath's maw, their customer service has gotten progressively worse. Qwest's customer service is OK as long as you're willing to learn the right magic phrases that they use. That's the hard part. On the flip side, their field techs have always been uniformly competent when I've dealt with them in spite of having to cope with the massive wad of bureaucracy that goes along with working for a huge telecom company.

DSL in general is slow in Seattle because the city hasn't spent much effort in upgrading its (or encouraging telecoms to upgrade their) old copper telecom infrastructure. When line lengths aren't just really long, they're often running over corroding 40 and 50 year-old copper. In about half the buildings I've lived in, the NID was still the very old nut-and-bolt screw down terminal style interfaces. 66 and 110 blocks? What are those?