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Review by jamesmil See Profile

  • Location: Seattle, King, WA, USA
  • Cost: $125 per month
  • Install: about 6 days
  • Telco party Qwest
Incredibly fast, great install, great value
Included router doesn't do AC wireless, some confusion over using my own
CenturyLink 1G Fiber is the best internet service yet.
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

It all started about a month ago.

CenturyLink has been heavily advertising their new 1Gig service in Seattle, but my neighborhood has never been listed as one served by fiber. To date, I've had Comcast/Xfinity Extreme 150 internet package, which has been mostly fine, though the speed could be inconsistent during the evening, and the price is quite high. We've always maintained a CenturyLink telephone line and when you add the two bills together, our monthly cost was over $200.

Then, about a month ago, I noticed a truck in our neighborhood stringing new fiber optic cabling down along the telephone poles. I sent a tweet to @CenturyLinkSeattle to ask if this might mean their 1G service was coming sooner rather than later to our neighborhood. The responded quickly, but merely pointed me back to the "Fiber to the Press Release" website, which still had no mention of our neighborhood. Then last week, I noticed a post on Reddit, which mentioned an email, gig.seattle@centurylink.com, that was monitored by field sales supervisors who could tell you more about availability. So I wrote them and asked about the cable that had been hung on the poles.

Within an hour, they emailed back that yes, in fact, the 1Gig service was available at my house, and including the cost of our existing phone line, the price would be $125/mo, guaranteed for three years without contract. They scheduled the install appointment for the following Thursday, everything was handled over email, the thread continued into the weekend as they offer to answer any questions I might have. In fact it was so easy and pleasant, and still no public information about our neighborhood being served, I assumed that it would all fall apart and a tech would show up telling me there had been a mistake and try to sell me DSL.

On Tuesday, a tech knocked on the door to let us know he would be running a new cable from the telephone pole to the side of our house in preparation for the upcoming installation. On the day of the appointment, I had a service window between 9am - 1pm. The tech called at 9:15am to say he was 10 minutes away, and arrived at 9:25. He was extremely polite, looked at the side of the house where the phone box was, and my basement where the network equipment was, and explained everything he would be doing.

The install consisted of replacing my existing phone box with a new (only slightly larger) ONT endpoint, mounting a UPS on the wall in my basement, and running power from there up to the new ONT. The internet itself came from the ONT on a CAT6 cable, no modem is required.

The install took approximately two hours, and was trouble free. The tech said I was the first house in the area to be connected to the new infrastructure. He said that while the instals are time consuming, the infrastructure is more reliable and easier to maintain then the legacy copper and CL hopes to eventually replace it all. Neighborhoods with telephone poles are first, as no additional permits are required to deploy.

When he was done, we ran a speedtest -- seeing both download and upload over 900Mbps is a pretty amazing thing -- for the first time ever, my connection to the internet was as fast or faster then my local network in the home. I was receiving a 8x download and 20x upload speed boost, while saving nearly $100/mo over what I had been paying for Phone + Internet previously. Up and running without a hitch in less than a week from my initial contact with the CenturyLink sales team.

When the install was complete, I was equally surprised (despite earlier assurances) that there was no contract sign, not even a release for the install (note, having an existing CenturyLink account likely made this easier). Only an email a few hours later saying my service change request had been completed.

The downsides? None really. The only challenge I have had so far, is I don't like the internet router they provided ($100 purchase, vs a $7/mo lease) as much as my own. They provide a CenturyLink branded ActionTel C2000A router. It is very, very fast and perfectly capable, but I already have a high end ASUS RT-AC87U, which supports AC wireless networking, and more high end features (VPN, better monitoring, guest networks, etc).

The ASUS does support PPPoE WAN connections, but because of the way the VLAN is tagged on the CenturyLink network, it doesn't connect as is. I'm told that I can work with the CenturyLink tech support team to configure the VLAN to work with my modem, but so far I haven't been successful in making this happen (I'll update this review when I do). Note, this is not a huge negative, the provided router is perfectly fine for 99% of our household activity. Our house is now significantly faster than most of the rest of the internet... we are limitless.

I can't believe my good fortune to qualify for this service, and I the high quality interactions I've had with CenturyLink field sales staff and technical installers as part of this experience prompted me to write this review. While there is no contract holding me, I can't imagine every giving up this amazing service.

UPDATE 3/30/15: Today I discovered how to assign the VLAN Tag ID on my router, and once set, it connected just fine via PPPoE to the service. No configuration change was required by CenturyLink.

member for 19.8 years, 31 visits, last login: 2.7 years ago
updated 8.9 years ago


where
@amazon.com

where

Anon

neighborhood?

what neighborhood of seattle are you in? bought a new house and wondering if they're in mid beacon hill area
jamesmil
join:2004-05-31
Seattle, WA

jamesmil

Member

Re: neighborhood?

I'm in the Montlake neighborhood, not far from Husky stadium.
IanLee
join:2014-11-24
Woodland, WA

IanLee

Member

Re: neighborhood?

My sister lives in a neighborhood well across from Husky Stadium and Comcast is their only option.

starwater
@qwest.net

starwater to where

Anon

to where
Oh boy. Beacon Hill. Yeah me too. They only offer 12mbits in my area right south of the golf course. Let's pray faster speeds come soon in our lifetime.
Beck38
join:2014-05-12
Centralia, WA

Beck38

Member

Will have to keep closer tabs...

I thought West Seattle was 'in the bulls-eye' in Century, guess I'll have to take a much closer look (esp. in the S.Seattle region), esp. now as Frontier continues to close/shut down neighborhood after neighborhood in the original Verizon-built FIOS plant in Snohomish County.

psycl0ptic
@qwest.net

psycl0ptic

Anon

can you tell or show how you set the vlan tags?

it's great that you figured this out, but how about a show and tell. location of the settings? native firmware or other - tomato - merlin?

thanks!
ChefJoe
join:2015-06-08
Seattle, WA

ChefJoe

Member

West Seattle install prep

Hi James, how far did they run the power from your basement to the ONT on the side of the house ?

I'm scheduled for install on the 16th (after the door-to-door person bungled an install ticket on the 4th with an incorrect address and the tech this morning rescheduled with no call) so I've got plenty of extra time to ponder how things can run from the currently prepped fiber from the pole to the teleco drop on the exterior of the attached garage to the newer network/telecom hub area I have that's on the interior of the opposite wall of the garage, about 30 ft away.

Did the installer discuss running fiber into the home rather than doing the copper conversion on the exterior of the house ?