1 edit | [CenturyTel] Steer clear of centurylinkl! I work for one of their tech support vendors and I'm on the front lines.
Their field techs are lazy. The service is poor at best and only two kinds of people have DSL. Those that don't know any better or those who have no choice. The technology is complicated and unreliable.
I take about 35-40 calls per day and about 30% of their customers are in a state of perpetual "Bandwidth Exhaust" with no relief planned. Yet they continue to put new customers on these networks.
Routine are issues of people ordering DSL from them and waiting weeks only to discover there is no order!
Steer clear from someone who knows from whence they speak!
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What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about? Hmm? |
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| "Hi this is B with Centurylink's help team we are sorry for your issues blah blah blah, please send us a message at this link blah blah blah and it will fall on deaf ears and blind eyes. LOL
Sorry couldnt resist lol |
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 NormanSPremium,MVM
join:2001-02-14
San Jose, CA
kudos:9
 ·SONIC.NET
·Pacific Bell - SBC
| reply to mklangelo
said by mklangelo:The service is poor at best and only two kinds of people have DSL. Those that don't know any better or those who have no choice. The technology is complicated and unreliable.
I have to call, "BS" on this part. I have no experience with CL field techs, but doubt if they are worse than SBC, AT&T.
What I have experience with:
Signed up Pacific Bell DSL Service in February, 2001. While it was all that was available, it was reliable. I stayed with them as ... if I continue, it will sound like a review, and I don't need to pollute this CenturyLink forum with an AT&T review. Granted I did fire AT&T in April, 2011; but it was for "cap-and-overage", and "price creep", not bad service.
I replaced them with Sonic.net "Fusion", going from tiered ADSL at 3008/512 to untiered ADSL2+ at 5900/540. Then changed residence, and was able to get "Fusion" at 18889/839.
Oh, and while she only had it for the last few weeks of her life, my Mother had CL VDSL at ~20000/2000; and, for the brief time I got to use it, while visiting her Oregon residence, it was looking as reliable as AT&T DSL.
Three providers, all DSL, and reliable service; nothing wrong with DSL. It is no more complicated, or less reliable than DOCSIS 3.0; and with ADSL2+, or VDSL on copper less than 3500 feet, it can be as fast as many cable systems on their lowest tier.
My YouTube average performance is better than either AT&T, or Comcast for the City of San Jose in the South S.F. Bay Area of California; with an ADSL2+ connection.
Forgot the screen shot:
My YouTube speed.
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Norman
~Oh Lord, why have you come
~To Konnyu, with the Lion and the Drum |
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| Even a broken clock is right two times a day... |
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Reviews:
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| You have many valid points as CTL cares only about money and generally not much else. Their customer service overall is terrible and their social media efforts half assed at best. With that said you obviously have an agenda by coming here and posting this. A tech support vendor for any ISP is going to get the junk, tier 1 calls. I'm sorry for you having to deal with CTLs shoddy network management but if you hate it so much that you have to come to a public forum to bash them why not get another job? |
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Reviews:
·CenturyLink
| reply to mklangelo
Re: [CenturyTel] Steer clear of centurylinkl! I have Centurylink phone and DSL service, and I have no problem what so ever. I also think it's rather rude of you to imply that all CL service areas have the same problems. I'm sorry that you are a "contracted" support person in an area that has issues, but I'm very happy with my service, and the techs in my area do respond promptly. I've even had a tech show up to my house without me even calling for support. After a resent thunderstorm CL detected a line problem, and they dispatched a tech to my house. Turns out one of the "protectors" in my network interface (the de-mark point outside my house) had suffered a "hit" and I didn't even notice it.
Get over yourself already. 
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| reply to mklangelo
My service is really pretty good UNTIL we get a thunderstorm, then its useless, and i have tried over and over to get a resolution, no one cares as i always pay the bill. bottom line |
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| reply to mklangelo
What cheeses me off about them is that there are no intiatives to improve service or offer higher speeds. |
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 OP
@comcast.net | reply to Swashbuckler
Well. let me put it this way. Everytime I take a "Bandwidth Exhaust" call with no ETR and it's been like that for about 8 months, I feel like I need a shower. |
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| reply to mklangelo
TNI (TeleNetwork)? |
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Reviews:
·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to supertbone
CTL has several initiatives in many areas to upgrade speeds. Their number one priority is to make as much money as possible by spending as little amount as possible. Smaller areas will never get dedicated bucks to get their superfast speeds imo. But your statement is wrong. CTL has bonded DSL, VDSL2+ etc and offers 25M, 40M, 50M, 80M and even 100M. Just sayin.. |
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1 edit | reply to mklangelo
After a couple of days that the OP has been up it's time to call BS on the post.
First of all, CTL does have issues in many areas with their DSL. It has been over sold and CTL is so slow to upgrade that it seems like it may never be done. I will stipulate to all of that.
The BS I call is this is not true of every DSLAM that CTL has. The area I work in, we only have a couple of non fiber fed DSLAM that have a backhaul exhaust, but for the most part I'd say that 95% of the DSLAMS in the area I work operate at rated speeds.
We're just starting to roll out bonded service so speeds are going up to 40MB. You also have to understand that twisted copper pair is completely different that coax or FTTP, so you have different range of speeds.
Now to your comment about the techs. It's a very broad statement you made and I will only defend this tech. I will challenge every bit of computer and DSL knowledge you have against mine and believe me you will fall far short.
Your lazy comment does ring a bell as over the period of DSL deployment I found that tech support went from some very good people in the early years to now that it appears they are paid piece rate and blow off every customer they can and send it to the field techs so they can get to the next call and double or triple their money.
As a field tech I'm tired of having to reconfigure modems because your fix is to reset the modem and you're happy to leave a customer out of service until the tech arrives to put the modem back into bridge mode. There are so many episodes like this that I refer to the help desk as "The Helpless Desk". |
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| reply to GetMoney
said by GetMoney: why not get another job?
That is not always possible immediately.
As someone who worked for ATT, I definitely sympathize. ATT was so grossly bad that if you didn't work there you can't imagine. CL is probably very similar (just a guess)
I got out and have an excellent job now, but it takes time. |
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4 edits | reply to NormanS
said by NormanS:Three providers, all DSL, and reliable service; nothing wrong with DSL. It is no more complicated, or less reliable than DOCSIS 3.0; and with ADSL2+, or VDSL on copper less than 3500 feet, it can be as fast as many cable systems on their lowest tier.
Having installed both I absolutely disagree. Vehemently.
Just guessing, cable took me on average 1/3 the time to install, and was absurdly more reliable. ( I can count my charge backs on one hand )
I handily beat that record every week at ATT, not because of improper installs but to a myriad of main line issues, bad ports, VOIP outages, equipment failure, techs pulling the wrong jumpers (VERY COMMON), drops being unhooked, customers messing with NIDS, wrong assignments, line techs not showing up, etc...
Sure much of which is not directly related to the core DSL tech, but its implementation is its Achilles heel. |
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1 edit | reply to mklangelo
Okay in Portland going on a dozen years FWIW, I've had Qwest/CenturyLink in Portland OR for well over a decade, and it has been completely solid. I've always got the advertised BW and outages have been rare. The only problems have been relatively slow available speeds for a west coast metro area, finally cured with the introduction of FTTN, and unstable connections entirely due to the leased modems with crappy firmware -- and this is cured by running them in RFC 1483 bridged mode with your own router handling the PPPoE link. I prefer running my own router anyway, so this is no hardship.
Recently I found that *inbound* connections to port 25 were timing out, rendering my mail server useless. One phone call to their tech support fixed it. They didn't quite admit they'd started blocking it, but they did handle it during the call and the port is now unblocked. The call went pretty well, too. The usual obnoxious phone menu but no wait for a tech once I got through it.
So not to question other people's bad experiences, which I can easily believe and do sympathize with, but if you're in Portland your only choice is Comcast or CenturyLink, and I've really had pretty consistently good experience with them. I'm running internet-only DSL, no phone service, and I did have to talk to a loyalty or customer retention agent on the phone to get a decent rate, but beyond that, no issues at all. |
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NormanSPremium,MVM
join:2001-02-14
San Jose, CA
kudos:9 Reviews:
·SONIC.NET
·Pacific Bell - SBC
| reply to DataRiker
Re: [CenturyTel] Steer clear of centurylinkl! Customers screw with cable, too, leading to ingress/egress issues which have adverse impact on entire nodes. If a customer can get his hands on it, he will mangle it; cable or DSL.
I support five DSL lines. Installation was no harder, or longer than cable (I've done two). Reliability is comparable.
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Norman
~Oh Lord, why have you come
~To Konnyu, with the Lion and the Drum |
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 tobyTroy Mcclure
join:2001-11-13
Seattle, WA | reply to mklangelo
If CL has competition in your location there is a good chance that CL's service is pretty good.
If CL has zero competition in your location, your service can vary from junk to absolute junk.
That is how the monopoly works in the US. |
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