Review by kg4muc member for 10.2 years, 724 visits, last login: 22 days ago updated 1.9 years ago
Marion,Smyth,VA
$107 per month
(month by month)
about 3 days
CenturyTel
"Easy setup and install"
"Poor Line Quality Fixed ! Speeds are now in line with the norm for our loop distance"
"So Far Very reliable! And Much More Pleasing Cost Wise Compared To Cable!"
Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings match consensus)
Switching from a cable ISP to a Telco ISP raised some questions from some but I had my reasons... Currently I am at the lowest speed tier they offer but my line problems have been corrected enough to go to the 3 meg tier soon. We received the Zyxel 660 Modem/router which has worked out good so far.. It does have a great config page! It's not nearly as fast as what we originally had with cable but for the price difference it works fine. We do not do any gaming so even a little latency is not a big problem. The local support folks were great and finally fixed a line problem we have been dealing with for over 8 yrs!
Bottom line...so far we have been delivered a quality service for the price!
Update as of October After Having the service for a few months and going through some pretty bumpy times getting everything up to max I think we have reached that goal!
After numerous service calls things were corrected a little at a time which is making real progress since these problems have been here for many years! Our local techs here are great and we have one very hard working tech who has went way above and beyond his call of duty to make sure everything is working right!
We are satisfied totally with the price and service now as things have really begun to work as they should!
The one thing I am worried about is the Century Tel Merger ! I am so afraid this will mess up what we have worked hard to get..quality service and a fair pricing schedule!
One thing I can give high ranking to is that when we call for tech support we DO get someone that speaks english and we can understand what they are saying!
At this point I can say we are happy and would really hate to have to switch to some other alternative for our broadband needs! I just hope it stays the same as it is right now or gets a bit better...not worse as a merger could do!
Update February 2009 We have been plagued with lots of down time the last several weeks. Seems as if we are online but we are unable to pull and IP , receive or transmit data. We have called tech support so much that if they used caller ID they would probably would have not answered LOL! Being that we send data packets throughout the day and night ( PWS) we catch an outage before most of our locals here do so that is why the numerous calls! We do not send tons of data a day just many small packets.. way less than that of gaming or running of torrents
I have to give a big dose of Kudos to Embarq Joey he stepped up to the plate and got our problem escalated to the chronic problem team and that was when things began to look up! We did experience a drop today which was very much a reminder of what we just endured for weeks but a reboot has cured that so far!
Basically once you get the right people on the job things get done! And many thanks to Joey for getting the right people on our problem! With people like him and a couple of our local techs Embarq should have a much better rating that what you hear!
Hopefully some day we will be able to get a faster speed but that's going to require a remote more close to us or fiber implementation either of which is likely to be a long spell away! If we can maintain what we are getting right now we'll be very happy
We are getting back into our summer mode of operation with the much appreciated warmer temperatures. Only down fall to that is I have to reset the modem any where from 2-5 times daily to stay connected! As long as the temperatures are below the 50's I don't have that problem and since we have had this since the get go I don't look for them to ever repair it so the reliability rating takes a beating with this as far as I am concerned! I don't really believe 5 resets of the modem a day is acceptable..especially since there is a definite temperature related fault!! Never happens in cold weather!
After a couple of days work by two determined techs the problem of dropped connections when warm may be repaired! So that leaves me to adjust the reliability and value for the money ratings back up a notch!! Thanks to Joey and everyone who helped get this done!
10/04/09 Don;t have a lot to add except that we have had extremely reliable service for the last few months( I hate to say that and jinx myself) All the people involved in finding the problem and a solution were successful in doing so and our much improved service proves that hard work and determination can pay off ! Joey was instrumental in getting things rolling when it appeared they were bottle necking. I can only hope things will be as good or better with Century Link in the future!
11/2010 Update We have been able to upgrade to a 4 meg download plan which so far has worked just fine. Download delivery speeds have been consistently at or very near the cap! Having a little trouble with latency but that is a result of the package change and with Joey's help we will have that cleared up shortly! So far our connection has had only one outage in a year and that was corrected by the second tier of tech support in about an hour. Otherwise it has stood heavy snow, flooding rains, tornado like winds and lightning and I know for certain it was up and running when the local cable was not. So all in all it's been doing very well! Sure hope it continues to do just that!
06/2011 We are once again plagued by high latency and upload speeds that are almost non existent . I think we are supposed to get 512Kb up which is terribly wimpy to begin with but we only average getting 200-270Kb max upload. This causes me some problems with my web page updates which happen once per minute...but they are relatively small packets. Most of the time it takes 1.5 minutes for the update to get uploaded. We were at a slightly higher upload speed until we made a change to our phone service which caused us to get put on this dial up upload speed.
Basically they have sold more bandwidth than they have available it seems. Leaves me with options I really didn't want to explore but may have to..
Marion,Smyth,VA
$107 per month
about 3 days
CenturyTel
"Easy setup and install"
"Poor Line Quality Fixed ! Speeds are now in line with the norm for our loop distance"
"So Far Very reliable! And Much More Pleasing Cost Wise Compared To Cable!"
