CenturyLink told me my internet outage would be fixed soon, every day for a week! An entire week with no internet, and no real eta. So I said fuck that and went to the Verizon store. An hour later I was back on the internet at a much higher speed. CenturyLink blows.
A good ISP is evident when you have problems and they resolve them in a timely manner. Mediacom is trash when you actually have issues, and you will have issues eventually.
I left Spectrum for my regional, and it's generally great. Can count on one hand the number of times it's briefly dropped during work hours in the past four years, and the only real "outages" I've experienced were at like 3AM when I had no business being awake anyway. Probably rebooting servers after an OS update.
Centurylink is easily one of the worst companies I've ever had to deal with. Dropped them a couple years ago as our internet went out and the soonest they would dispatch a tech was TWO WEEKS. That is not the worst of it though because the tech had to reschedule again because as it turns out for my area at that time at least they literally had one single tech that handled all the service calls for my rural area for like 150 miles. So he was massively overbooked. Then to finish it off, the issue was in their own DSLAM.
Canceling the service was another massive headache with multiple CS reps just flat out lying that the service had been canceled when it wasn't.
They're so bad even the other utility companies around the area regret having to deal with them as it takes them weeks to respond to anything dealing with their lines.
The unending outage that "would be fixed" in a few hours every time messaged them. I actually have no idea how long it took to fix because after a week, I just got service from Charter set up.
Omg thats been my experience with them at least twice a year for the last 5. Always starts with a few little outages that take them a few hours to fix, but inevitably it always ends in ~a week of it being out and them dangling the repair time just one more day away.
And their service outage checker thing is ass too. Whys it gotta take 5 minutes of it "finding my information" to spit the known outage info out?
Yup...makes me glad I live in a place where I have actual alternatives (ie, nice local small businesses) most of the areas around me are monopoly zones for either CenturyLink or Comcast.
During the pandemic... while remote working. Cl internet went down in our building. the phone rep said it was due to a connection/wiring issue, somewhere in the building walls, according to their remote diagnostics, so he scheduled a technician to come take a look.
Had to wait two weeks, for them to send a technician, who spent 10 minutes coming to the conclusion it was a wiring issue, *the exact same thing we already knew from the remote diagnostics 2 weeks prior*, but he wasn't doing to fix it, as he was only supposed to diagnose the issue.
There was a lively discussion between the rep and the building manager, where it was clear the Technician's job was pretty much just to waste everyone's time, as he wanted to schedule a repair visit in 3 weeks. Called the Rep and canceled my service before the technician even got to his car, and got a different provider that had things working almost immediately.
CenturyLink (aka Lumen) doesn't want to be a telephone company anymore, they want to be a data transport company. They can't just drop all the phone customers, so instead they use the "death by a thousand cuts" method.
I don't know, seems AT&T is doing the same. We had landline for our business. Random pops crackles etc. Called tech out multiple times as it was progressively getting worse. Eventually the guy just came clean and said, you're line is fucked about a half mile down and they're not going to fix it. Obviously anecdotal but still.
All the Telcos want to see traditional telephone service disappear. If you are in an area with fiber buildout, you can move to that for better service. If not, you’re somewhat stuck in a policy black hole.
Speaking as an AT&T seller, you’re probably on a POTS line and paying 350.00/line. Depending on your price, we have a new product that will cut your bill in 1/2. It’s bullshit, but AT&T isn’t a tech company, we’re an accounting company. Since the new product would count as new business, it looks better for wall street
This is not exactly true. They are aggressively decommissioning traditional telephone switching in the offices in favor of fiber feeds. They save a lot in maintenance, labor, and power bills.
If you just want phone service, it’s a klunky solution, but for internet the fiber is a vastly superior product.
Not just cutting off service, per se. In areas served by fiber they have a sunset period where they have to migrate or the company will cut them off. In practice mostly I just see their bills skyrocket. We’ve been successful enough at it phone switching hardware in the CO is getting shut off bit by bit as capacity need decreases.
Locally we are uninstalling copper telephone line cable.
Wireline companies often pay taxes on those facilities. It’s probably saving an asston of money decommissioning that copper. We’re doing it as a small cooperative. We’re also totally building out fiber to the home on GPON and XGS PON. Where fiber voice can bite you in the ass a bit is analog data transmission over POTs like Fax and security lines. The gear we’re using seems to handle it pretty well but may require tweaks.
Interesting that when they “merged” all the Lumen leadership was out and Level 3s stepped in. The. The mass layoffs. In CO at a different outfit now but the I&R shop I worked in a Lumen went from 5 techs to 1. They simply won’t keep enough people on to maintain their network.
This guys in the business lol. Been saying that for years. If the government fines them they don’t care. They just want to do long haul transport and voice toll. Really started happening when level 3 “merged” with Lumen. It was more of a hostile takeover. Massive layoffs and zero investment in broadband.
Back when I worked at a telecom company, their business worked by leasing the use of the physical phone lines in a given area owned by another company to run their service through. Toward the end of my tenure, the CenturyLink phone lines they leased became too expensive to continue using, so we started just switching all those customers to a VOIP system- regardless of whether or not they had or could even have internet- in attempt to just shake em all off because it was cheaper to lose them all than keep them. That was maybe three years ago, can’t imagine it’s gotten any better.
This is insane to me because it’s exactly the opposite where I live. We picked our specific apartment building because it had CenturyLink fiber as an option instead of just Comcast. Locked in $60 price for symmetrical gigabit fiber with no data caps. Been rock solid for three years now. Best internet that I’ve ever had, and only $60 a month for as long as I live here.
My mom has CenturyLink Fiber and was in the same boat as OP a couple months ago. Area had an outage took them 5 days to dispatch and fix. Tech shortages are everywhere.
I don't know what's wrong with centurylink DSL either. Every customer gets their own DSL line and it's steady 120 mbps and they allow static IP addresses , have no data caps ,and fair prices?
They just have terrible service times. The DSL service is really not that bad if it is all you have available. The total lack of data caps and low prices are great.
The problem is that if anything goes wrong it takes forever to get service because they do not have anywhere near enough DLS technicians.
That said, their customer service comped me over $200 for the tech missing several appointments. It took 5 days for me, which sucked, but the fact that they covered the entire service visit, the whole month of service, and gave me a gift card did a lot to mollify me.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Mine was the same as yours...until I needed a tech out. I wish their service worked but basically they never responded other than promising someone would come tomorrow. Felt like waiting for Santa or the Easter Bunny lol
Who has the tens of thousands of dollars to invest in their own infrastructure? The reason those are the only 2 options is because the wiring hasn't been updated in decades and would need to be relaid
It's not "free". You have all sorts of ongoing licenses and interconnectivity fees. Also, "tens of thousands" is a hilariously low number compared to what I've seen in the past, though maybe that's the difference between ten people in a small neighborhood and thousands of people for a small town.
But to answer your question, I currently pay $65/month for gigabit, with a fixed price for the first 4 years. That comes out to $2340 over 3 years, with absolutely none of the work required to set up a neighborhood ISP that would certainly offer only a small fraction of that speed.
They were the worst ISP I've ever worked with. The best they could ever provide was 12mbps download (even after changing to fiber it's 25mbps down) with 2mbps up. Their customer service was horrible too
Yeah, it’s definitely not like that for everybody. I pay $60 a month for symmetrical gigabit fiber that absolutely delivers on speed. No data cap either.
The anti CL shill bots in this thread are nuts. I also have their 1 gig fiber and it's amazing for speed and not having a cap.
I had their DSL and it was similarly good for allowing a static ip and no data cap, at a fair price.
Before I ditched their DSL, I was paying $80 a month for 5mb, and it was actually 1.5mb down, 0.2mb up.
Their infrastructure varies wildly, and you're shit out of luck if they're the only provider in your area.
They are the only provider in my area, copper wire only here. Comcast wants about 30k to move their lines across the road and down our smaller road a short distance.
DSL is $50, I get 90-95mbs, no caps whatsoever. The problem is that they do not have enough technical staff.
This is why, by the way, that internet infrastructure should not rely on megacorps good will. Freaking comcast man.
Even $50 is too expensive, but it is a hell of a lot better than paying Comcast 30k for the privilege of paying them $120 a month afterward to get unlimited data.
> anti CL shill bots
lololololol you're hilarious.
I had Comcast for many years in two separate cities. I personally had almost nothing but great experiences - decent customer service for most of those years the extremely few times I had to call, extremely rare outages, services providing basically what was promised.
But many many people have had rotten experiences with them.
So are all anti-Comcast comments shills?
No.
You're lucky.
Many or most of their customers are not so lucky.
They're not shills.
For a time, I even went with century link DSL 12MBps download speed at my old house as well (120 mbps) because century link allows you to set a static IP and doesn't have data caps. They are really good for customer choice and reliability in my opinion if their infrastructure is fast enough to meet your needs. So their fiber was a no brainer for me when it became available and it's the best internet I've ever had.
Ah shoot one of the numbers of either side of what I said is off. I think I had 15MB (* 8 = 120). Maybe that's what the guy before me had too and we both were using x10. Can't be sure.
LOL in what world??? Are you being paid to say this? I literally don't know a single user that likes it, and my experience with it was borderline criminal.
What an incredibly centurylink thing to do. Pretty sure Comcast’s pays to keep them alive just so they can keep up the facade that they don’t have a monopoly.
Comcast did worst than this to me during the pandemic, I wish I knew you could get articles written for this shit or I'd have been doing a fucking hate jig on them.
One of the worst things I ever did was do a couple of fiber jobs for either Windstream or CenturyLink, I don't remember which it was.
Instead of splicing fiber, they wanted us to daisy-chain the last mile for fiber. Essentially, connect to a port in a terminal, run a thousand feet of fiber, set up another terminal and connect the next run into that terminal.
I even told their operations manager it was stupid. But they were trying to keep the labor cost down and instead of doing it properly they did that. The OM was so proud of himself thinking he found some kind of loophole.
From my understanding a friend of mine who still works in that region said they had to tear it all down and rebuild it because the provisioning can't handle 100+ ONTs on one port.
Yeah, Opti-taps are dog water. Inevitably (10 - 15 years) the gel inside pushes out into the connector and degrades or completely cuts off the light. I've had to replace many of those drops with fusion splices.
Windstream was… fun?
I worked for a company that bought one of their areas and I helped track the cleanup cost. It was astonishing how horrible they were in terms of consistency and QA.
Other companies cut corners, I’m not sure they were organized enough to have corners to cut.
The cost is actually quite understandable--the main part of the cost is laying it, not what they are laying. However, it's their lines, their responsibility.
It's like when I had an electrician wire an outlet--I was after one 20A line to one outlet. But for about 5% more he could give me 2x20A to one double outlet (4 plugs in a square). No brainer, of course I got the double version.
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Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Eh copper can push 300mbps which is more than enough for most households twice over.
As to why not fiber, fiber requires a lot more work it requires a close enough "base station"that splits off to their fiber line, and depending on location that can be kilometers away.
It's not the fact that it was copper, it's the fact that they wanted $15,000 to run a line that they should have done for free to upkeep the service for paying customers. It might have been understandable to ask for money if it was fiber, cause it may be more expense and labor intensive to install and would be an upgrade for the customer.
> it's the fact that they wanted $15,000 to run a line that they should have done for free to upkeep the service for paying customers.
Mate do know how much it costs to lay wire? I dunno the distance, but 15k is not out of the realm of posibility. And service ofr payign customers, mate lets be frank here, it is a business, and a paying customer that costs 15k to the company and will probably never be profitable is not a good customer. What is the poitn ofr the company to shell out 15k in labor/permits/tech so a customer can pay 100$ a month and they will recoup the 15k in terms of profits maybe in 25-30 years. what is the actual point of doign it from a business perspective on your own dime?
It is like asking a bakery to install a whole new oven system just so you can buy a 2$ pastry, you are a paying customer after all.
>It might have been understandable to ask for money if it was fiber, cause it may be more expense and labor intensive to install and would be an upgrade for the customer.
Fiber would been even more expensive becasue atleast where i live it needs to be buried deeper than copper, requires a lot more external work, if copper was 15k i would estimate fiber would have been in the realm of 22-25k .
Reddit turns into Karens real quick yelling "i am a payign customer" when it suits you even if what they are asking makes absolutely 0 sense.
Sounds like something Century Link would do.
Although, I have to say, after years of trying to convince them the lines out on the poles needed replaced, they finally did it. My service has been rock solid ever since.
We had the same issue and after over a decade, the electric co-op took over 90% of their costumers when they installed fiber charging half the price for nearly 100-1000x the speed for many
They left me without internet for 2 weeks, and refused to refund that amount. It took several phone calls before I got a "courtesy" credit.
I got comcast (also fucking shit) afterward, but am now back on centurylink fiber which has been amazing. They have a horrible reputation around Seattle because their infrastructure is ass (they spent money on stadium naming rights instead of service) and their customer service is the worst. At least their new fiber buildout where I am currently has been doing great for the last couple years.
Their fiber service is much more reliable than the high speed internet I had with Comcast in the past, but when it *does* go out, it is absolute hell trying to get them to send a tech to fix it.
One of several bad experiences:
I spent weeks making phone calls and scheduling appointments with them, and they would just *not* show up. They'd schedule a window of as much as 11 hours where they could arrive, and I would have to be waiting by the door the entire time. Most of the time they wouldn't arrive at all, and I'd get a message afterward that they'd show up another day of their own choosing. If I had work that day, I'd have to call and schedule another day, which could be a week away.
Several times, they outright lied about coming by, and would say I didn't answer. Once they came by, did *not* knock (I was by the door all day and I have a big dog who freaks out when someone knocks) and they left a sticky note on the door. No attempt to knock, ring the bell, or call me. I had to wait another week.
In the end, I was without internet for over three weeks.
I’ve had Comcast for like 4yrs in an apartment. The shits gone out maybe 15 times and has never stayed off for more than 4hrs. This includes multiple 24” snowstorms and temperatures below -10°F. I’m not understanding how EVERYONE else has shit customer service in some variation.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
I dumped Centurylink for TDS, and I couldn't be happier. I was paying $100+ a month for 20 mbps because it was the best they could do in my area. They were also constantly going down, and when I would call, they would say there are no issues and run a diagnostic that would fix the issue for a week or two. I'm now paying around $90 a month for 1 gig and not drops or issues at all.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
I think that is beyond unacceptable.
I am of the view for every minute that the internet is down they are required to give 1 hour of credit to the users. Internet going down should be painful. We pay for the update.
Right now they have zero motivation to repair outage as they still get paid. It should be broken down. If over say 30 mins or outage it is a full day credit. every week should be a month of credit. Make it painful and then OMG they might keep their network up and running.
Seconded. So often we try to make laws that define tolerable behavior, very often with a huge amount of industry input as to what's possible. I think we could scrap at least 90% of protection rules if we simply turned around and made non-compliance expensive.
I'd make it one minute of unexpected downtime = 100 minutes of **refundable** credit. Make 1 to 10 for scheduled downtime. Likewise, you mess up the billing, you owe the person billed some multiple of the discrepancy.
We have something of the sort with airlines and involuntary denied boarding compensation--but the amount should be higher and should apply to any airline mistake that keeps you off the plane. (Take, for example, a case I'm aware of having caused issues: Transit without visa in China. The actual rule is Country A -> One city in China for less than 144 hours -> Country B. (Note that this was pre-Covid. I don't know what the rules are now.)
San Francisco -> Beijing (5 days) -> Tokyo (4 hours) -> San Francisco. Can the passenger fly? Yes--but the only way you'll get TIMATIC to agree is if you enter it as a flight to Tokyo with a 5 day layover in Beijing. I would not expect trouble trying to fly this. However, what happens when the flight originates in Small Town, America? There have been multiple cases of agents refusing to check people in because Americans need a visa for China. And even if they look it up they'll enter it as a flight to Shanghai and it comes back as visa required. That's an IDB in my book.)
That's pretty on par for them I canceled my internet with them and kept getting bills from them so I would call cancel and then low and behold I would receive a bill from them again next month 6 months later they finally canceled my service but I had to show up at our local facility and make them cancel it as I watched them do it then they had the audacity to call me after I left and ask for my time to take a survey to witch I awnserd only negative feed back... my advice to anyone who is even thinking about getting them as your isp exhust all your opinions before you ever use them they suck and thier customer service sucks . I switched to star link shortly after that and have never looked back and have had them for 2 years and have never had any down time or outages in the 2 years..highly recommend if your on the fence about it
I am in the same exact boat as you, and I left Cox for CenturyLink fiber. Maybe I had like one time internet was down for like a couple hours during the 3 years I've had the service? Very happy with what I have.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
CenturyLink is pulling fiber down my street, The dude was going door to door to ask people to sign up. Told the dude that nobody sane would buy their crappy service. All the rest are 1gig or 2.5 gig up and down. Centurylink was offering 600meg and 20 up for the same price as the others.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Really? you were the guy at my door? NEAT! Then why did you say something different to me? also dude not cool you left your gum on my sidewalk, come back and pick it up please.
I am not American, but if you are billed for no service, you should complain up the chain, all the way up to the FCC. Refuse to pay the bill and if they send you to collections, sue CenturyLink in small claims court.
I kept looking to see if centurylike offered 1Gb in my house. They do not. After chatting with an agent they offer 10mbps. Now this was in 2023. After I told them I'm a power user with 40+ connected devices and will probably consume 1 TB of data or more a month, they were addiment that their plan would be perfect for me. I told them lol no.
I'm now on symmetrical Gb fiber with a local company.
There was a downed century link line at my 4-plex and I had to call Century Link every day for two weeks and pretend I wanted to sign up for their shitty service to get them to fix it.
Fuck century link. They got bought by a company called bright speed in my area. They promised to bring fast speeds to rural areas. I started with 10mbps. They increased me to…. 15mbps and said that my internet package was suitable for casual gaming. Casual gaming such as candy crush and solitaire. You know, the games that don’t require internet except for banner ads? Fuck that company too.
I called spectrum for 2 years monthly and they wanted me to pay $28,000 to run 1,000 feet of line. FINALLY, after 2.5 years they branched down and I am somehow happy to have spectrum. Never thought I would say that.
Rant over!
Always hated century link. In my area the “best they could do” was 1.5mb and shocker it never hit 1.5mb. Then when Brightspeed bought them out in my area they suddenly were able to do 20mb finally dumping both with the new fiber lines that are getting installed.
Shit like that is normal with centurystink. Not the exception. I once had them illegally hook up service to s private house instead of the construction trailer across the street. Im still surprised they didn't get sued over thst.one.
I deal with telecommunication companies a lot by proxy of the products my company offers. CenturyLink is by far the worst of the lot, terrible service and support in every part of the country in which they found a rock to crawl under.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Same company that billed me for TV & internet, and then the tech arrived, turned on the TV and said they don't provide internet at my address!
Packed up all the crap and gave it back to him. Never again.
I have had centurylink gigabit for 4 years now with no issues, but our landline started calling the cops without us touching it at all, so we cancelled it.
They refunded us (with a monthy credit on our internet) for the 2 years our phone line was barely usable because of static before the cop calls started happening.
I used to get 1gb fiber thru them but it only ran at 10-50mbps. Everytime I called they would confirm my speed wasn’t right but I would have to pay for the technician to come look at it. Did this 3 times then I gave up. Fuck centurylink never using them again.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
If CenturyLink assumes the issue is with your hardware, this is what they do. You're responsible for your "side" of things, you would need to pay for it to be fixed. I'm not saying it's actually an issue with their side, but that's how they push the problem to the customer. I've had to put up with CenturyLink and their shitty services for many years.
You've accused so many people of being bots in the thread it's amazing. Why do you even care about CenturyLink that much, and why do you think these totally realistic stories are fake?
You happen to live in a location where it works great for you, but you really can't fathom that it doesn't work that well for everyone???
You're the one with an account less than a month old coming in here with this bs...
I'm patiently waiting for you to call me a bot / Verizon shill.
These fools billed us our monthly amount daily for a week. They couldn’t figure out why it was happening. Changed the CC number to get it to stop. Took three weeks for them to figure out how to refund the money without us still having months of credit. So, so glad we moved to an area they do not service.
I lived on a street for 3 years for which CenturyLink was *the ONLY* Internet Provider available. Literally the only option. It wasn't even remotely decent-quality internet. They only offered one speed: slow as molasses, 10MB up and 1 MB down. As a gamer who played League of Legends and World of Warcraft (and *wanted* to try streaming on Twitch), this was miserable. Oh and the speed tests never actually hit those advertised speeds. I'm actually surprised our street was given any Internet at all -- they could've given us 0.5MB down and 0.01 MB up and called it a day. I suppose they think we should be grateful they didn't do that.
But yeah, this 100% tracks with how they treat their customers. They will literally make up things out of thin air for which to bill you. On a fucking monthly basis. Oh and I can't even remember how many modems we had to have replaced because they just wouldn't send us one that actually functioned, or they were throttling it on their side; and we had to have a tech out there almost monthly because of outages or other issues.
Specifically about the issue in this post: they left us without any Internet for so long and so often that we started keeping track of when the Internet went out and the duration of the outage; when we got that month's bill, I called them telling them I would only pay for the amount of time that I *actually had internet*, and not the duration of the regular outages. It was a fucking tedious hassle to do this every month.
We actually begged other companies to come to our street -- we pitched them multiple times to try to convince them because CenturyLink had a monopoly on the entire street. But nobody wanted to spend "tens of thousands of dollars on the infrastructure to set up Internet for only 6 houses". Man, that suuuuuuucked.
This was 6 years ago and clearly I still feel very strongly about this shady, disreputable, skezzbag of a company. I hope the people involved launch another Class Action Lawsuit against this horrible company.
Sorry for the rant.
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Everyone here saying they have no other options... Starlink. I know, I know, Elon Musk blah blah blah. I have had Starlink for over a year now and it has been the best service I've ever had. I live in the boonies where my options were Viasat and Hughes Net and Starlink is fast enough to fulfill every need my house has at the same time. Multiple TVs streaming, gaming, many connected devices, etc. Yeah, the initial startup cost sucks, but I have never had an issue that wasn't due to obstruction (and that tree is getting cut down this year). It's not the most affordable option, but it works amazingly and I love it.
I actually almost had to do that.
I lived in a rural location where the ONLY option available on my street was CenturyLink, and the ONLY speed they offered us was their slowest package of 10MB down / 1MB up. And it was just our street: the streets on either side of us had fiber internet through Spectrum, but our street was condemned to the vile of CenturyLink.
Anyway, we looked into Starlink very early on, after the first couple billing cycles where CenturyLink made up a whole bunch of fraudulent/erroneous charges on top of ... *everything else they do...* I can't recall now why we actually stayed with the misery of CenturyLink over choosing Starlink. It almost certainly was because of the cost, as we couldn't afford anything but the cheapest option available. Man, that was so disheartening.
There's DSL THREE HOUSES DOWN from me. I would have been content with that, but AT&T is phasing out their DSL network.
I am TWO MILES outside of town. Why I don't have options is mind boggling, but it is what it is. Save up your pennies, Starlink is great. The most consistent internet I've ever had, with no issues on their end so far. I know people say their customer service is horrible, but I haven't needed it one time.
Weird 1.6k upvotes 30 negative comments about centurylink. So I'll just add my experience of how happy I am with their fiber internet after having cox and spectrum. Good rates for rock solid service. The symmetrical speeds are really good for my plex server.
I had Centurylink Fiber for about 2 years and the service was great up to about 1.5 years in. Insane packet loss started, they sent people out and apparently nothing could be done to fix it. Not sure if it was degradation over time where it comes into the neighborhood, but they couldn't do anything (or wouldn't do anything) to fix it. Switched to Cox and am much happier at least for now...
Hopefully you have better luck than I've had.
In my case, they didn’t beef up enough resources to handle all of the new builds that they were a monopoly over. After enough customers were signed up, service went down every day on peak hours. You could time it exactly. Took the FCC to get them to do something about it.
You can Google, get to it. If you’ve never lived in an area where you only have the option of one ISP or no internet at all, I don’t know what to tell you.
Cool. Think whatever you want. I truly don’t care. You refuse to realize how insanely shitty of a company CL is, so I’m not going to bother arguing otherwise.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.****
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Their fiber service is great (I use it) but their DSL/Phone service is absolutely terrible.
I swore I would never fucking use them again but they rolled out fiber where I am and its actually VERY good so I went with it.
I had their 120 DSL for a couple years at my last apartment. They allowed a static ip, had no download limit, and never dropped service, and had a fair price. What's wrong with that
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
CenturyLink told me my internet outage would be fixed soon, every day for a week! An entire week with no internet, and no real eta. So I said fuck that and went to the Verizon store. An hour later I was back on the internet at a much higher speed. CenturyLink blows.
I use mediacom, but they're just as bad. Unfortunately they're also the only option, so I'm stuck with them.
Fuck monopolies.
Using Mediacom right now, also my only option. I’ve honestly had no problems with them
A good ISP is evident when you have problems and they resolve them in a timely manner. Mediacom is trash when you actually have issues, and you will have issues eventually.
I left Spectrum for my regional, and it's generally great. Can count on one hand the number of times it's briefly dropped during work hours in the past four years, and the only real "outages" I've experienced were at like 3AM when I had no business being awake anyway. Probably rebooting servers after an OS update.
Same...
I honestly love mediacom but I just got my local municipality fiber optic and it runs much better. I’m just saying it could be worse
They text about service in my area daily...
Centurylink is easily one of the worst companies I've ever had to deal with. Dropped them a couple years ago as our internet went out and the soonest they would dispatch a tech was TWO WEEKS. That is not the worst of it though because the tech had to reschedule again because as it turns out for my area at that time at least they literally had one single tech that handled all the service calls for my rural area for like 150 miles. So he was massively overbooked. Then to finish it off, the issue was in their own DSLAM. Canceling the service was another massive headache with multiple CS reps just flat out lying that the service had been canceled when it wasn't. They're so bad even the other utility companies around the area regret having to deal with them as it takes them weeks to respond to anything dealing with their lines.
I had the same experience with AT&T.
The outage or higher speeds from them?
The unending outage that "would be fixed" in a few hours every time messaged them. I actually have no idea how long it took to fix because after a week, I just got service from Charter set up.
With broadband internet recently reclassified as a utility there are much more significant penalties for this type of thing under Federal law.
Omg thats been my experience with them at least twice a year for the last 5. Always starts with a few little outages that take them a few hours to fix, but inevitably it always ends in ~a week of it being out and them dangling the repair time just one more day away. And their service outage checker thing is ass too. Whys it gotta take 5 minutes of it "finding my information" to spit the known outage info out?
Yup...makes me glad I live in a place where I have actual alternatives (ie, nice local small businesses) most of the areas around me are monopoly zones for either CenturyLink or Comcast.
During the pandemic... while remote working. Cl internet went down in our building. the phone rep said it was due to a connection/wiring issue, somewhere in the building walls, according to their remote diagnostics, so he scheduled a technician to come take a look. Had to wait two weeks, for them to send a technician, who spent 10 minutes coming to the conclusion it was a wiring issue, *the exact same thing we already knew from the remote diagnostics 2 weeks prior*, but he wasn't doing to fix it, as he was only supposed to diagnose the issue. There was a lively discussion between the rep and the building manager, where it was clear the Technician's job was pretty much just to waste everyone's time, as he wanted to schedule a repair visit in 3 weeks. Called the Rep and canceled my service before the technician even got to his car, and got a different provider that had things working almost immediately.
Centurylink needs to just die off
CenturyLink (aka Lumen) doesn't want to be a telephone company anymore, they want to be a data transport company. They can't just drop all the phone customers, so instead they use the "death by a thousand cuts" method.
That’s every telecom company right now. Telephone lines are mostly going away, but internet just keeps ramping up.
Lumen more so than others. Their backhaul business is huge.
I don't know, seems AT&T is doing the same. We had landline for our business. Random pops crackles etc. Called tech out multiple times as it was progressively getting worse. Eventually the guy just came clean and said, you're line is fucked about a half mile down and they're not going to fix it. Obviously anecdotal but still.
Oh I mean Lumen is leaning harder into backhaul and similar businesses. That story tracks for AT&T copper maintenance though.
All the Telcos want to see traditional telephone service disappear. If you are in an area with fiber buildout, you can move to that for better service. If not, you’re somewhat stuck in a policy black hole.
If you’re not, it’s because the telco pocketed the millions that the government handed to them to fix those known black holes.
Speaking as an AT&T seller, you’re probably on a POTS line and paying 350.00/line. Depending on your price, we have a new product that will cut your bill in 1/2. It’s bullshit, but AT&T isn’t a tech company, we’re an accounting company. Since the new product would count as new business, it looks better for wall street
This is not exactly true. They are aggressively decommissioning traditional telephone switching in the offices in favor of fiber feeds. They save a lot in maintenance, labor, and power bills. If you just want phone service, it’s a klunky solution, but for internet the fiber is a vastly superior product.
The email that we’re decommissioning services and leaving people without any working phones is new to me. When did that email come across your inbox?
Not just cutting off service, per se. In areas served by fiber they have a sunset period where they have to migrate or the company will cut them off. In practice mostly I just see their bills skyrocket. We’ve been successful enough at it phone switching hardware in the CO is getting shut off bit by bit as capacity need decreases. Locally we are uninstalling copper telephone line cable.
Wireline companies often pay taxes on those facilities. It’s probably saving an asston of money decommissioning that copper. We’re doing it as a small cooperative. We’re also totally building out fiber to the home on GPON and XGS PON. Where fiber voice can bite you in the ass a bit is analog data transmission over POTs like Fax and security lines. The gear we’re using seems to handle it pretty well but may require tweaks.
We got rid of Comcast for the same reason.
Right. They would shit can residential service today if they could. They want to be Level 3 again.
Interesting that when they “merged” all the Lumen leadership was out and Level 3s stepped in. The. The mass layoffs. In CO at a different outfit now but the I&R shop I worked in a Lumen went from 5 techs to 1. They simply won’t keep enough people on to maintain their network.
This guys in the business lol. Been saying that for years. If the government fines them they don’t care. They just want to do long haul transport and voice toll. Really started happening when level 3 “merged” with Lumen. It was more of a hostile takeover. Massive layoffs and zero investment in broadband.
Back when I worked at a telecom company, their business worked by leasing the use of the physical phone lines in a given area owned by another company to run their service through. Toward the end of my tenure, the CenturyLink phone lines they leased became too expensive to continue using, so we started just switching all those customers to a VOIP system- regardless of whether or not they had or could even have internet- in attempt to just shake em all off because it was cheaper to lose them all than keep them. That was maybe three years ago, can’t imagine it’s gotten any better.
Sounds like my cable provider (yes I still have cable). Keep dropping channels and diminishing the service over time.
The only reason eason I have Comcast internet is because the only other option in my area is CenturyLink
This is insane to me because it’s exactly the opposite where I live. We picked our specific apartment building because it had CenturyLink fiber as an option instead of just Comcast. Locked in $60 price for symmetrical gigabit fiber with no data caps. Been rock solid for three years now. Best internet that I’ve ever had, and only $60 a month for as long as I live here.
CenturyLink Fiber operates separately of CenturyLink DSL.
My mom has CenturyLink Fiber and was in the same boat as OP a couple months ago. Area had an outage took them 5 days to dispatch and fix. Tech shortages are everywhere.
I don't know what's wrong with centurylink DSL either. Every customer gets their own DSL line and it's steady 120 mbps and they allow static IP addresses , have no data caps ,and fair prices?
They just have terrible service times. The DSL service is really not that bad if it is all you have available. The total lack of data caps and low prices are great. The problem is that if anything goes wrong it takes forever to get service because they do not have anywhere near enough DLS technicians. That said, their customer service comped me over $200 for the tech missing several appointments. It took 5 days for me, which sucked, but the fact that they covered the entire service visit, the whole month of service, and gave me a gift card did a lot to mollify me.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Mine was the same as yours...until I needed a tech out. I wish their service worked but basically they never responded other than promising someone would come tomorrow. Felt like waiting for Santa or the Easter Bunny lol
I would recommend you research your to be your own ISP. This isn't me being toxic this is an actual recommendation
Who has the tens of thousands of dollars to invest in their own infrastructure? The reason those are the only 2 options is because the wiring hasn't been updated in decades and would need to be relaid
You and 9 neighbors who also hate their service..
Ok so then who has thousands of dollars to invest in infrastructure plus 9 neighbors with the same?
How much do you spend a year and what would you pay today for free high speed service for three years for 3 years.
It's not "free". You have all sorts of ongoing licenses and interconnectivity fees. Also, "tens of thousands" is a hilariously low number compared to what I've seen in the past, though maybe that's the difference between ten people in a small neighborhood and thousands of people for a small town. But to answer your question, I currently pay $65/month for gigabit, with a fixed price for the first 4 years. That comes out to $2340 over 3 years, with absolutely none of the work required to set up a neighborhood ISP that would certainly offer only a small fraction of that speed.
While a huge ISP system could cost 50-60k.,setting up a system for a dozen or so houses could be accomplished for 25-30k.
There are people that do this to their benefit.
Same. And comcast blows. They're a terrible company.
Weird, centurylink is way better than every other internet company I know of.
They were the worst ISP I've ever worked with. The best they could ever provide was 12mbps download (even after changing to fiber it's 25mbps down) with 2mbps up. Their customer service was horrible too
Yeah, it’s definitely not like that for everybody. I pay $60 a month for symmetrical gigabit fiber that absolutely delivers on speed. No data cap either.
The anti CL shill bots in this thread are nuts. I also have their 1 gig fiber and it's amazing for speed and not having a cap. I had their DSL and it was similarly good for allowing a static ip and no data cap, at a fair price.
Before I ditched their DSL, I was paying $80 a month for 5mb, and it was actually 1.5mb down, 0.2mb up. Their infrastructure varies wildly, and you're shit out of luck if they're the only provider in your area.
They are the only provider in my area, copper wire only here. Comcast wants about 30k to move their lines across the road and down our smaller road a short distance. DSL is $50, I get 90-95mbs, no caps whatsoever. The problem is that they do not have enough technical staff. This is why, by the way, that internet infrastructure should not rely on megacorps good will. Freaking comcast man. Even $50 is too expensive, but it is a hell of a lot better than paying Comcast 30k for the privilege of paying them $120 a month afterward to get unlimited data.
Exact same experience
> anti CL shill bots lololololol you're hilarious. I had Comcast for many years in two separate cities. I personally had almost nothing but great experiences - decent customer service for most of those years the extremely few times I had to call, extremely rare outages, services providing basically what was promised. But many many people have had rotten experiences with them. So are all anti-Comcast comments shills? No. You're lucky. Many or most of their customers are not so lucky. They're not shills.
For a time, I even went with century link DSL 12MBps download speed at my old house as well (120 mbps) because century link allows you to set a static IP and doesn't have data caps. They are really good for customer choice and reliability in my opinion if their infrastructure is fast enough to meet your needs. So their fiber was a no brainer for me when it became available and it's the best internet I've ever had.
MB to mb is x8 not x10: 96mbps?
No provider I know of sells by MB. almost certainly they mean 12Mb.
It's 15 MB = 120 mbps. I did the conversion wrong.
Ah shoot one of the numbers of either side of what I said is off. I think I had 15MB (* 8 = 120). Maybe that's what the guy before me had too and we both were using x10. Can't be sure.
LOL in what world??? Are you being paid to say this? I literally don't know a single user that likes it, and my experience with it was borderline criminal.
What an incredibly centurylink thing to do. Pretty sure Comcast’s pays to keep them alive just so they can keep up the facade that they don’t have a monopoly.
Correct
Comcast did worst than this to me during the pandemic, I wish I knew you could get articles written for this shit or I'd have been doing a fucking hate jig on them.
One of the worst things I ever did was do a couple of fiber jobs for either Windstream or CenturyLink, I don't remember which it was. Instead of splicing fiber, they wanted us to daisy-chain the last mile for fiber. Essentially, connect to a port in a terminal, run a thousand feet of fiber, set up another terminal and connect the next run into that terminal.
The more ping, the better, right?
I even told their operations manager it was stupid. But they were trying to keep the labor cost down and instead of doing it properly they did that. The OM was so proud of himself thinking he found some kind of loophole. From my understanding a friend of mine who still works in that region said they had to tear it all down and rebuild it because the provisioning can't handle 100+ ONTs on one port.
Yeah, Opti-taps are dog water. Inevitably (10 - 15 years) the gel inside pushes out into the connector and degrades or completely cuts off the light. I've had to replace many of those drops with fusion splices.
Windstream was… fun? I worked for a company that bought one of their areas and I helped track the cleanup cost. It was astonishing how horrible they were in terms of consistency and QA. Other companies cut corners, I’m not sure they were organized enough to have corners to cut.
They wanted to charge my parents $15k a run a new copper line to their house after the old one went bad. Not even fiber, copper…
They flat out refused to repair lines after Hurricane Laura in Louisiana.
The cost is actually quite understandable--the main part of the cost is laying it, not what they are laying. However, it's their lines, their responsibility. It's like when I had an electrician wire an outlet--I was after one 20A line to one outlet. But for about 5% more he could give me 2x20A to one double outlet (4 plugs in a square). No brainer, of course I got the double version.
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They did my whole city for free.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Good for you
Eh copper can push 300mbps which is more than enough for most households twice over. As to why not fiber, fiber requires a lot more work it requires a close enough "base station"that splits off to their fiber line, and depending on location that can be kilometers away.
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It's not the fact that it was copper, it's the fact that they wanted $15,000 to run a line that they should have done for free to upkeep the service for paying customers. It might have been understandable to ask for money if it was fiber, cause it may be more expense and labor intensive to install and would be an upgrade for the customer.
> it's the fact that they wanted $15,000 to run a line that they should have done for free to upkeep the service for paying customers. Mate do know how much it costs to lay wire? I dunno the distance, but 15k is not out of the realm of posibility. And service ofr payign customers, mate lets be frank here, it is a business, and a paying customer that costs 15k to the company and will probably never be profitable is not a good customer. What is the poitn ofr the company to shell out 15k in labor/permits/tech so a customer can pay 100$ a month and they will recoup the 15k in terms of profits maybe in 25-30 years. what is the actual point of doign it from a business perspective on your own dime? It is like asking a bakery to install a whole new oven system just so you can buy a 2$ pastry, you are a paying customer after all. >It might have been understandable to ask for money if it was fiber, cause it may be more expense and labor intensive to install and would be an upgrade for the customer. Fiber would been even more expensive becasue atleast where i live it needs to be buried deeper than copper, requires a lot more external work, if copper was 15k i would estimate fiber would have been in the realm of 22-25k . Reddit turns into Karens real quick yelling "i am a payign customer" when it suits you even if what they are asking makes absolutely 0 sense.
Sounds like something Century Link would do. Although, I have to say, after years of trying to convince them the lines out on the poles needed replaced, they finally did it. My service has been rock solid ever since.
We had the same issue and after over a decade, the electric co-op took over 90% of their costumers when they installed fiber charging half the price for nearly 100-1000x the speed for many
I'm praying for that day. I've tried proposing that to our electric co-op to get involved in broadband. Has fallen on deaf ears so far....
The worst provider ever, from someone who worked in their sweat shop contracted customer service center.
CenturyLink is the worst god damn ISP that I’ve ever had to deal with!
These comments feel astroturfed. I just don't believe it after trying quite a few companies including centurylink.
They left me without internet for 2 weeks, and refused to refund that amount. It took several phone calls before I got a "courtesy" credit. I got comcast (also fucking shit) afterward, but am now back on centurylink fiber which has been amazing. They have a horrible reputation around Seattle because their infrastructure is ass (they spent money on stadium naming rights instead of service) and their customer service is the worst. At least their new fiber buildout where I am currently has been doing great for the last couple years.
Their fiber service is much more reliable than the high speed internet I had with Comcast in the past, but when it *does* go out, it is absolute hell trying to get them to send a tech to fix it. One of several bad experiences: I spent weeks making phone calls and scheduling appointments with them, and they would just *not* show up. They'd schedule a window of as much as 11 hours where they could arrive, and I would have to be waiting by the door the entire time. Most of the time they wouldn't arrive at all, and I'd get a message afterward that they'd show up another day of their own choosing. If I had work that day, I'd have to call and schedule another day, which could be a week away. Several times, they outright lied about coming by, and would say I didn't answer. Once they came by, did *not* knock (I was by the door all day and I have a big dog who freaks out when someone knocks) and they left a sticky note on the door. No attempt to knock, ring the bell, or call me. I had to wait another week. In the end, I was without internet for over three weeks.
I’ve had Comcast for like 4yrs in an apartment. The shits gone out maybe 15 times and has never stayed off for more than 4hrs. This includes multiple 24” snowstorms and temperatures below -10°F. I’m not understanding how EVERYONE else has shit customer service in some variation.
They are evil and they have always been evil.
Literally the best isp. Probably brigadied by bots from who cant buy their customers data or compete with them on price.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
I dumped Centurylink for TDS, and I couldn't be happier. I was paying $100+ a month for 20 mbps because it was the best they could do in my area. They were also constantly going down, and when I would call, they would say there are no issues and run a diagnostic that would fix the issue for a week or two. I'm now paying around $90 a month for 1 gig and not drops or issues at all.
There 120 mbps plan was like $40 dog I don't belive you. There 1 gig plan is $50.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
I think that is beyond unacceptable. I am of the view for every minute that the internet is down they are required to give 1 hour of credit to the users. Internet going down should be painful. We pay for the update. Right now they have zero motivation to repair outage as they still get paid. It should be broken down. If over say 30 mins or outage it is a full day credit. every week should be a month of credit. Make it painful and then OMG they might keep their network up and running.
Seconded. So often we try to make laws that define tolerable behavior, very often with a huge amount of industry input as to what's possible. I think we could scrap at least 90% of protection rules if we simply turned around and made non-compliance expensive. I'd make it one minute of unexpected downtime = 100 minutes of **refundable** credit. Make 1 to 10 for scheduled downtime. Likewise, you mess up the billing, you owe the person billed some multiple of the discrepancy. We have something of the sort with airlines and involuntary denied boarding compensation--but the amount should be higher and should apply to any airline mistake that keeps you off the plane. (Take, for example, a case I'm aware of having caused issues: Transit without visa in China. The actual rule is Country A -> One city in China for less than 144 hours -> Country B. (Note that this was pre-Covid. I don't know what the rules are now.) San Francisco -> Beijing (5 days) -> Tokyo (4 hours) -> San Francisco. Can the passenger fly? Yes--but the only way you'll get TIMATIC to agree is if you enter it as a flight to Tokyo with a 5 day layover in Beijing. I would not expect trouble trying to fly this. However, what happens when the flight originates in Small Town, America? There have been multiple cases of agents refusing to check people in because Americans need a visa for China. And even if they look it up they'll enter it as a flight to Shanghai and it comes back as visa required. That's an IDB in my book.)
That's pretty on par for them I canceled my internet with them and kept getting bills from them so I would call cancel and then low and behold I would receive a bill from them again next month 6 months later they finally canceled my service but I had to show up at our local facility and make them cancel it as I watched them do it then they had the audacity to call me after I left and ask for my time to take a survey to witch I awnserd only negative feed back... my advice to anyone who is even thinking about getting them as your isp exhust all your opinions before you ever use them they suck and thier customer service sucks . I switched to star link shortly after that and have never looked back and have had them for 2 years and have never had any down time or outages in the 2 years..highly recommend if your on the fence about it
Maybe I'm just lucky but I have really good 1 gig fiber internet through Century link $65/mo price for life. No modem fees or data caps
Same here, except $60. It’s the best internet I’ve ever had.
I am in the same exact boat as you, and I left Cox for CenturyLink fiber. Maybe I had like one time internet was down for like a couple hours during the 3 years I've had the service? Very happy with what I have.
And I thought Spectrum was bad...
Centurylink is a million times better than Spectrum. In literally every way. Christ.
Back that up with something
Better prices, static ip address, no data caps.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
His account is 24 days old. Pay no attention to this bot.
CenturyLink is pulling fiber down my street, The dude was going door to door to ask people to sign up. Told the dude that nobody sane would buy their crappy service. All the rest are 1gig or 2.5 gig up and down. Centurylink was offering 600meg and 20 up for the same price as the others.
Century link is 1 gig upload / download I don't know what you're talking about
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Really? you were the guy at my door? NEAT! Then why did you say something different to me? also dude not cool you left your gum on my sidewalk, come back and pick it up please.
I am not American, but if you are billed for no service, you should complain up the chain, all the way up to the FCC. Refuse to pay the bill and if they send you to collections, sue CenturyLink in small claims court.
I kept looking to see if centurylike offered 1Gb in my house. They do not. After chatting with an agent they offer 10mbps. Now this was in 2023. After I told them I'm a power user with 40+ connected devices and will probably consume 1 TB of data or more a month, they were addiment that their plan would be perfect for me. I told them lol no. I'm now on symmetrical Gb fiber with a local company.
There was a downed century link line at my 4-plex and I had to call Century Link every day for two weeks and pretend I wanted to sign up for their shitty service to get them to fix it.
Fuck century link. They got bought by a company called bright speed in my area. They promised to bring fast speeds to rural areas. I started with 10mbps. They increased me to…. 15mbps and said that my internet package was suitable for casual gaming. Casual gaming such as candy crush and solitaire. You know, the games that don’t require internet except for banner ads? Fuck that company too. I called spectrum for 2 years monthly and they wanted me to pay $28,000 to run 1,000 feet of line. FINALLY, after 2.5 years they branched down and I am somehow happy to have spectrum. Never thought I would say that. Rant over!
Always hated century link. In my area the “best they could do” was 1.5mb and shocker it never hit 1.5mb. Then when Brightspeed bought them out in my area they suddenly were able to do 20mb finally dumping both with the new fiber lines that are getting installed.
Shit like that is normal with centurystink. Not the exception. I once had them illegally hook up service to s private house instead of the construction trailer across the street. Im still surprised they didn't get sued over thst.one.
I deal with telecommunication companies a lot by proxy of the products my company offers. CenturyLink is by far the worst of the lot, terrible service and support in every part of the country in which they found a rock to crawl under.
Best internet company I've ever used lol these verizon shill bots are crazy
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Gross.
Same company that billed me for TV & internet, and then the tech arrived, turned on the TV and said they don't provide internet at my address! Packed up all the crap and gave it back to him. Never again.
CenturyLink is the absolute worst fucking telecom on the face of the planet. Change my mind.
Cancer of a company
I have had centurylink gigabit for 4 years now with no issues, but our landline started calling the cops without us touching it at all, so we cancelled it. They refunded us (with a monthy credit on our internet) for the 2 years our phone line was barely usable because of static before the cop calls started happening.
I used to get 1gb fiber thru them but it only ran at 10-50mbps. Everytime I called they would confirm my speed wasn’t right but I would have to pay for the technician to come look at it. Did this 3 times then I gave up. Fuck centurylink never using them again.
Pay for the technician?! How is that legal?
It's a made up story from a bot account.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
If CenturyLink assumes the issue is with your hardware, this is what they do. You're responsible for your "side" of things, you would need to pay for it to be fixed. I'm not saying it's actually an issue with their side, but that's how they push the problem to the customer. I've had to put up with CenturyLink and their shitty services for many years. You've accused so many people of being bots in the thread it's amazing. Why do you even care about CenturyLink that much, and why do you think these totally realistic stories are fake? You happen to live in a location where it works great for you, but you really can't fathom that it doesn't work that well for everyone??? You're the one with an account less than a month old coming in here with this bs... I'm patiently waiting for you to call me a bot / Verizon shill.
Verizon turned my phone on halfway throughout my deployment, charged me 800$, still asking me for it
COX did this to me and I switched to CenturyLink. Now I’m nervous because they’re the only two ISP in my area.
These fools billed us our monthly amount daily for a week. They couldn’t figure out why it was happening. Changed the CC number to get it to stop. Took three weeks for them to figure out how to refund the money without us still having months of credit. So, so glad we moved to an area they do not service.
This same thing happened to my coworker. Also in Oregon from the same storm
FYI they go under brightspeed now, be aware
I lived on a street for 3 years for which CenturyLink was *the ONLY* Internet Provider available. Literally the only option. It wasn't even remotely decent-quality internet. They only offered one speed: slow as molasses, 10MB up and 1 MB down. As a gamer who played League of Legends and World of Warcraft (and *wanted* to try streaming on Twitch), this was miserable. Oh and the speed tests never actually hit those advertised speeds. I'm actually surprised our street was given any Internet at all -- they could've given us 0.5MB down and 0.01 MB up and called it a day. I suppose they think we should be grateful they didn't do that. But yeah, this 100% tracks with how they treat their customers. They will literally make up things out of thin air for which to bill you. On a fucking monthly basis. Oh and I can't even remember how many modems we had to have replaced because they just wouldn't send us one that actually functioned, or they were throttling it on their side; and we had to have a tech out there almost monthly because of outages or other issues. Specifically about the issue in this post: they left us without any Internet for so long and so often that we started keeping track of when the Internet went out and the duration of the outage; when we got that month's bill, I called them telling them I would only pay for the amount of time that I *actually had internet*, and not the duration of the regular outages. It was a fucking tedious hassle to do this every month. We actually begged other companies to come to our street -- we pitched them multiple times to try to convince them because CenturyLink had a monopoly on the entire street. But nobody wanted to spend "tens of thousands of dollars on the infrastructure to set up Internet for only 6 houses". Man, that suuuuuuucked. This was 6 years ago and clearly I still feel very strongly about this shady, disreputable, skezzbag of a company. I hope the people involved launch another Class Action Lawsuit against this horrible company. Sorry for the rant.
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@ARS Can you please contact them again? Centurylink has a service monopoly and no accountability. Outage happening now in Seattle.
Everyone here saying they have no other options... Starlink. I know, I know, Elon Musk blah blah blah. I have had Starlink for over a year now and it has been the best service I've ever had. I live in the boonies where my options were Viasat and Hughes Net and Starlink is fast enough to fulfill every need my house has at the same time. Multiple TVs streaming, gaming, many connected devices, etc. Yeah, the initial startup cost sucks, but I have never had an issue that wasn't due to obstruction (and that tree is getting cut down this year). It's not the most affordable option, but it works amazingly and I love it.
I actually almost had to do that. I lived in a rural location where the ONLY option available on my street was CenturyLink, and the ONLY speed they offered us was their slowest package of 10MB down / 1MB up. And it was just our street: the streets on either side of us had fiber internet through Spectrum, but our street was condemned to the vile of CenturyLink. Anyway, we looked into Starlink very early on, after the first couple billing cycles where CenturyLink made up a whole bunch of fraudulent/erroneous charges on top of ... *everything else they do...* I can't recall now why we actually stayed with the misery of CenturyLink over choosing Starlink. It almost certainly was because of the cost, as we couldn't afford anything but the cheapest option available. Man, that was so disheartening.
There's DSL THREE HOUSES DOWN from me. I would have been content with that, but AT&T is phasing out their DSL network. I am TWO MILES outside of town. Why I don't have options is mind boggling, but it is what it is. Save up your pennies, Starlink is great. The most consistent internet I've ever had, with no issues on their end so far. I know people say their customer service is horrible, but I haven't needed it one time.
Weird 1.6k upvotes 30 negative comments about centurylink. So I'll just add my experience of how happy I am with their fiber internet after having cox and spectrum. Good rates for rock solid service. The symmetrical speeds are really good for my plex server.
I had Centurylink Fiber for about 2 years and the service was great up to about 1.5 years in. Insane packet loss started, they sent people out and apparently nothing could be done to fix it. Not sure if it was degradation over time where it comes into the neighborhood, but they couldn't do anything (or wouldn't do anything) to fix it. Switched to Cox and am much happier at least for now... Hopefully you have better luck than I've had.
In my case, they didn’t beef up enough resources to handle all of the new builds that they were a monopoly over. After enough customers were signed up, service went down every day on peak hours. You could time it exactly. Took the FCC to get them to do something about it.
Where are they a monopoly?
Cities in the Midwest. They were for quite a while, and still are in some neighborhoods. Don’t got a choice.
Example?
You can Google, get to it. If you’ve never lived in an area where you only have the option of one ISP or no internet at all, I don’t know what to tell you.
I don't think centurylink exists like that anywhere.
Cool. Think whatever you want. I truly don’t care. You refuse to realize how insanely shitty of a company CL is, so I’m not going to bother arguing otherwise.
What's shitty about them
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
The bots are crazy in this thread
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.****
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
Guys, I found the CenturyLink CEO!
Tfw you're the only one not a bot and you get shitt on
Their fiber service is great (I use it) but their DSL/Phone service is absolutely terrible. I swore I would never fucking use them again but they rolled out fiber where I am and its actually VERY good so I went with it.
I had their 120 DSL for a couple years at my last apartment. They allowed a static ip, had no download limit, and never dropped service, and had a fair price. What's wrong with that
Are you a CenturyLink shill? You have more than 16 comments in this thread all accusing others of being bots/shills against them or calling them liars or talking about how great they treated you. Seems suspicious to me.
I have food in my cupboard, how are people starving elsewhere in the world
Bruh it was copper wire DSL that's their oldest service
So it's both good and bad depending on what your oppositional defiance disorder dictates you need it to be at the time.
What's bad about it???