US Telco Support → CenturyLink > [CenturyTel] Century Link's poor service

[CenturyTel] Century Link's poor service

I live in Denver's suburb. I lost DSL connection on 9/16/13. I had verified that my MODEM and internal wiring are OK. I tried 2 known good MODEM right at the box on the side of the house, the DSL LED still blinking for no signal. I hooked up a spectrum analyzer to the loop, but saw no DSL signals at all. I called CL, asking them to look on their side for problems. CS determined that they had to send a tech out to fix the problem. They won't be able to send someone until 9/20/13. I told them that it could be something as simple as my line was accidentally disconnected at the trunk because I saw a tech working there half an hour before I found that my line went dead. I walked along the areal line between my house and the trunk, but saw no damage. My area was not affected by flooding anyway. It was sunny all day when the internet went dead.

What I would like to complain to CL is that 4 days to roll a truck is unacceptable for the service. I do understand that problems are different, some simple some are not. There are numerous of ways to speed up the service w/o costing much more. I was told by an ex-CL tech that majority of problems between the house and the DSLAM is where the physical wire connection is, if not at the DSLAM itself. A visit by a tech to the remote DSLAM could be done with multiple tickets related to that DSLAM. Each remote DSLAM is visited by techs with different tickets many time per day anyway. Easy problems could be taken care of in parallel and reduce customer down time.

CLNK has all hands on deck working to remediate problems in CO & NM caused by flooding. Having worked through many disasters with various telcos I can safely assume a lot of technicians have been relocated temporarily and just aren't around right now. A few months ago the same thing happened in other flood ravaged areas.

Update... As of noon 9-18-13, my internet connection was back to normal, but no communication from CL to me of what happened. Should I cancel the ticket, the problem was found and fixed or something just happened as random? I called CL 9-19-13, they said a tech looked at the trunk and found that my line was disconnected as I suspected. They reconnected it and closed the ticket. Anyway, all of the problems caused by CL's tech did a sloppy work in the first place.

The company has declared an emergency so the techs are basically working unlimited forced overtime in Colorado. They of course have moved techs from outside the area in also.
I guess Centurylink was running a backlog of orders due to never hiring anyone. Just like Qwest used to and run with as few techs as possible. So in areas they are running out of repair or that were not hit by flooding they are using the forced OT to clear up the backlog of orders.

All of the Telcos have reduced their field tech staff to as bare bones as possible thru buyouts and layoffs. The customer has to suffer so that the Executives get higher bonuses and the shareholders have inflated stock prices/dividends. Hopefully the techs can get a lot of work done before the end of September as OT Budgets are generally slashed dramatically in the 4th Qtr to make up for the 70-90hr weeks the techs work in the Spring thru Autumn months in order to make the numbers necessary to please Wall St.

Techs are still at 20+ minimum hours a week of OT.

I can understand the resources being used up by repairs of the flooding going on. However, this type of poor service has been common for years for many of us. I'm in Utah and the company itself has been pretty responsive on the local level, but when it comes to anything that will involve purchases that would improve area service or anything beyond a tech checking a home connection, we're often out of luck.

Dolgan, while what you say is very likely true, if you really want to show this, bring some of the resources like public earnings statements and such. Numbers speak loudly (unlike my DSL service when I have a downstream SNR of 2)

Hey there, I'm sorry for the frustration in the amount of time it took to get a dispatch created for your issue. Everyone's comments on here are spot on. The limited resources of technical specialists is at an all time high right now and we're looking for ways to grow and make it a better customer experience for all of you. I see that it started working again for you, is everything okay now? If you still need help, I'd love to look into it further for you. Please send us your account information and details to TalkToUs@centurylink.com. Thanks--AshleyKay