 Review by cosmicvoid 
member for 12.4 years, 2913 visits, last login: 4 days ago
updated 234 days ago
 Kingston,Kitsap,WA
 $44 per month- (12 month contract)
 about 6 days CenturyTel "reliable service so far, tech support seems competent" "none to speak of" "Its the only game in town, except for satellite"
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I was surprised to qualify for DSL, being so far from the small town of Kingston, WA (3+ miles). Service is only 512/256, but it sure beats dial-up. Its $30 for the first 3 months, then $50/mo. There was no "install" process, since I used my own modem (Cayman 3346), and the service was up and running sooner than the estimated date. Dynamic IP and PPPOE. Calls to tech support were answered after 5~10 minutes on hold, and the support people actually seemed competent and helpful. My minor setup issues were resolved quickly. So far, in the first week, there have been no problems, and I cant think of anything negative to say about centurytel.
Update 3/5/04:
The 512 kbps service is now obsolete, and 768 or 1536 is available. My wife discovered this while she was making changes to our telephone service bundle. Now the DSL is bundled in to the phone bill, and the speed has been upgraded to 1536/256. The price for the new bundle is about the same as the prior phone bill + DSL bill, so the speed increase is essentially free. Reliability continues to be excellent, I'd guess at least 99% uptime. I asked a CenturyTel repairman, who was at our house for a phone problem, if he knew my loop length, as I was surprised to have 1536 speed working. He said that my line came from an RT about 1.5 miles away, so I had a fairly short loop. Cool!
Update 4/6/06:
Reliability continues to be 99+%. Lately I've noticed that my sync rate is usually 1792/288, up from 1536/256. So I seem to be getting a bit of free bandwidth. I wonder if they are upping the rate to whatever my loop length will support.
Update 3/2/10:
Reliability continues at 99+%, typically only a few hours outage per year. I'm paying for 1536/256, but my sync rate is 1792/320. I am satisfied with the service, as I don't really need a faster connection.
Update 4/11/11:
Recently my service was upgraded to 2016/608 at no change in cost. I think the total outage time in the past year was less than a few hours. No complaints about the service.
Update 10/3/2012
Lately I've noticed that my modem is reporting my speeds as 3520/448. Don't know how they can keep increasing the connect rate on the same old copper lines (and no increase in cost), but I'm not complaining. Service continues to be reliable, not more than an hour or two of outage time in the past year, and typically it is a problem upstream of the gateway, not a local line issue.
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