Sunwest Communications Files $1.6 Million Lawsuit against U S West in District Court - Brief Article

Frustrated with U S West's delays and broken promises, Sunwest Communications Inc., a Colorado Springs-based telecommunications company, has filed a complaint with the District Court in El Paso County against Qwest Corp., which formerly did business as U S West, for breach of contract and unfair business practices.

Sunwest alleges that U S 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.

Sunwest also alleges U S West unfairly constrained telecommunications competition by connecting new customers much more quickly if they subscribed to U S West's services, instead of Sunwest's services. Sunwest is seeking payment of $1.65 million owed under the agreement and additional damages for U S West's unfair business practices.

Sunwest believes that U S West's poor services has hindered its ability to offer superior service to its rapidly growing customer base.

"Even before we contemplated this legal action, we'd sent letters to U S West regarding over 300 individual customer complaints since June of 1999," said Dan Potter, president and CEO of Sunwest Communications. "Every one of those complaints is the result of U S West's failure to comply with its obligations. It seems as if we were writing a letter a day to U S West, listing the complaints we received that day from disgruntled customers."

In the details of the lawsuit, Sunwest alleges that U S West signed an interconnect agreement with Sunwest in 1998 which would have enabled the newly founded company to exchange telephony traffic. Two weeks later, a U S West representative came to Sunwest's office in Colorado Springs to inform Sunwest that the telecommunications giant was not going to honor that agreement, then offered Sunwest an interim agreement to alleviate the problems and to compensate Sunwest for lost revenue.

Under the terms of the interim agreement, U S West was obligated to provide telephone switch interconnection by March 1999 and pay Sunwest access fees until the switch interconnection was complete. U S West failed to meet numerous deadlines and then stopped making the required payments in December 1999. In fact, Sunwest maintains, the telephone switch interconnection was implemented by U S West 15 months behind schedule.

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