US Telco Support > CenturyLink > [CenturyTel] Being terminated for excessive usage

reply to toby

Re: [CenturyTel] Being terminated for excessive usage

Terrible analogy.

Here's a better one - If you have a question as to your electricity usage, you have an easy way to check your current usage by reading the meter on your house.

have you posted this on their face book page?? always good to do thAt

reply to JustAmazing
While I completely agree that centurylink should have some type of way to check your usage I feel that the ultimate responsibility rests on the end user not having some way to determine your usage.

Like Toby's analogy, it's not the cops job to monitor your speed, you should have a speedometer and if you don't it's still not the cops problem.

The same goes here. Yes, CTL should have some way for you to check but until they get off their collective fat a**es and do something you shouldn't sit back and twiddle your thumbs and say it's Centurylinks problem. It takes two to tango. Also how are you going to check/challenge them to make sure they're right

While I know people can get a router that was DD-WRT on it & use that as a guideline, it would be nice to have something to compare it to

reply to firedrakes

reply to Ravynmagi7

i seeing it certain areas they dont give a dam and other parts they do.

reply to Ravynmagi7

quote:

---

I'll start by saying I'm 100% guilty of exceeding the usage policy. I've exceeded it quite a bit every month I've been with Centurylink. I'm a heavy user and I was aware this may be a problem, so I did opt for the fastest speed Internet I could to get the largest data cap available for residential service.

---

reply to Ravynmagi7

reply to dondude
My DSL was terminated by CenturyLink (formerly Qwest) last night. This was after two pop-up warnings a few months ago. A letter arrived in the mail ten days ago stating service would end on March 27th.

Interestingly, my online account showed that I was still being charged for the service. It is impossible to cancel DSL online (I love how companies let you sign up online but force you to call to cancel) so I called customer service to cancel. It took the representative about 15 minutes to figure out how do cancel the service.

I'm having Comcast broadband put in on Friday and will then switch my CenturyLink POTS line over to Ooma. I had been paying around $115/month to CenturyLink for POTS plus DSL. I've been a customer of them (well, AT&T, Mountain Bell, US West, Qwest, and so on) for over 35 years. When I've talked to them on the phone they haven't seen the least-bit concerned about losing me as a customer. I would have thought they'd be interested in keeping traditional land-line customers. Not so!

P.S. I'm using Google's FreedomPop to post this.

Its horrible that they are kicking people off their network what about those places where Centurylink is the ONLY provider to get internet services? Like in my situation.

According to the EUP, they allow you to upgrade to a business plan. However, the one thing I've been noticing in all these "excessive use threads" is the lack of info in regards of how much bandwidth someone used when they started to get notified. Either they didn't ask when they had to call or "forgot" what they were told. I would think this might be important, as there is a difference between recieving a letter if you used (lets say) 260 GB & used 500 GB

reply to Boulder

You're right. I don't know why I had thought Google had a relationship with them. I might have read somewhere that an ex-Google employee was involved in the startup.

Sorry about the misinformation.

BTW, I have no idea how much data I used that got me forced off. CenturyLink doesn't provide a way to view this important piece of information. One thing I find interesting is that CenturyLink's Prism TV service's downloads do not count against the 250GB limit, yet other streaming services, such as Tivo, do.

reply to Ravynmagi7
I got a termination notice last month. On the day I was supposed to terminate I switched to comcast. My connection has been rock solid since. I had the 40/5 tier with home phone. I was paying about $85 for the service and never got 40mb. I usually got about 31. Now I have unlimited phone and the blast Internet tier (50/10) and am actually pulling as high as 86mb steady. And, now I only pay $78. And caps have been suspended by comcast. I have to say in my case much better service and the one time I have had to deal with comcast CSR I have gotten what I needed / asked for with zero hassle and I spoke to an American. I think CL is going to loose a lot of business.

reply to Ravynmagi7
This says the cap is 300 GB, but the eup says it is 250 GB.

»CenturyLink 'Fires' Customers For Excessive Use...

»qwest.centurylink.com/internethelp/eup.html

quote:

---

[The meter] only considers the total usage (bytes transferred) over a defined period of time independent of protocols, applications, or the content that is generating the excessive usage.

---

on the PDF document, it says "For each calendar month". I read that to be from the 1st to the 31st of each month.

I'm not so sure that's what they mean. You also get billed once a month, so it could just as easily be your billing date.

A "defined period" could mean either of those, or some time they aren't saying, or it could actually mean if at ANY period you go over 250 GB.

Can someone from centurylink explain when the meter rolls over?

reply to Ravynmagi7
BTW is it just me or is CL lying with numbers?

quote:

---

Q: What is considered “excessive” or “high volume” use?
A: This small percentage of customers is on the extreme margin, using 30-1000 times the monthly volume
of customers in the same speed tier.
Less than 0.5% (one half of one percent) of customers approach these listed limits. This high usage
would equate to millions of emails, tens of thousands of photos or MP3 files and hundreds of hours of
streaming videos.

---