Qwest Communications International Inc. says it plans by midyear to bring six engineers to Spokane from its Denver headquarters to help it handle a more aggressive push to provide broadband Internet service here.


Over the last few months, Qwest has been moving faster to expand the reach of its digital subscriber line (DSL) services in the Spokane market, says Tom Novotney, Qwests Spokane-based director of field operations for Eastern Washington.


In November, the telecommunications company began offering DSL service in Liberty Lake, after installing the needed equipment at its switching office there. It also in the last several months has installed remote electronic equipment in about 36 neighborhoods that enables it to expand DSL service farther from the switching offices here that already are equipped with DSL circuitry.


Among the new neighborhoods to get DSL in recent months have been parts of the Whitworth area, Five Mile Prairie, Spokane Valley, Moran Prairie, and Hangman Valley, says Novotney.


Were expanding the footprint, he says.


That expansion and other market needs are requiring Qwest to beef up its Spokane-based engineering staff, which is housed in a facility at 904 N. Columbus, near Gonzaga University. That facility currently has 18 design engineers, which is roughly twice the number it had two years ago, says Novotney.


In the mid-1990s, Qwest began consolidating its work force systemwide, and its engineering team here was downsized considerably, he says. In the past year or so, though, its staff here has been growing again.


The six new engineers who are expected to transfer to the Spokane engineering office from Denver will be handling what is called plant design, which involves designing how Qwests network should be expanded within a market. The design engineers then take those plans and develop the more detailed plans needed to expand the network, he says. In the past, plant design for this market had been handled out of Denver, Novotney says.


He says the jobs that will be coming here pay between $50,000 and $60,000 a year.


He declines to say what areas of the Spokane market will be targeted to get DSL next, but says that Qwest plans to be even more aggressive about DSL expansion during the first two quarters of this year than it was last quarter. He says the company now has relatively good penetration of DSL coverage throughout the downtown area and the citys South Hill and North Side, though there continue to be gaps.


The DSL equipment in central switching offices, historically known as exchange offices, can provide service only within two to three miles of the office, due to signal degradation, Novotney says. By running fiber-optic cable from those central offices out to smaller, remote distribution hubs, which are housed in metal cabinets located along right-of-way within neighborhoods, Qwest can offer DSL roughly to 300 additional customers from each hub.


Novotney declines to disclose the investment Qwest is making in its DSL expansion here.


He describes the expansion as a competitive play, in a market in which Qwest faces broadband Internet competition from cable-TV providers such as Comcast, as well as an increasing number of wireless providers. Qwest primarily targets residential customers for its DSL service, he says.


Adds Qwest spokesman Michael Dunne, It (DSL) is a growth area for us. Its been a big push, from the CEO on down. Its an area that makes good business sense for us and one that helps us being able to offer a full bundle of services.


Spokane is just one of the markets in which Qwest is expanding its DSL service. In the last couple of years it has launched DSL service in most of the larger communities of Eastern Washington.


Qwest charges its regular phone service customers about $27 a month for a 256-kilobit-per-second DSL connection that includes unlimited Internet access through MSN. A higher-speed, 640k service is available for about $40 a month, it says. It charges more for residences that dont buy phone service through Qwest. It also offers DSL lines without Internet access for those customers who prefer to use an Internet Service Provider other than MSN.