Hoo boy, I expect they will not make the mistake of sending me surveys in the future.
And how would you rate our service / how likely are you to recommend CL to other people? 0 - Terrible / Not at all
Please explain your rating:
This is regarding the CL customer and repair service as a whole, not just this one call or this one person I spoke to on Sunday June 4th.
I have been told by the local repair technicians in the Gilman/Hawkins WI area that they do not work on weekends, and will not repair our DSL Internet if it goes down on a weekend. If our DSL stops working after about 3pm on a Friday, we know it won't be fixed until Monday at the earliest.
And so we had a thunderstorm that knocked out the DSL and as usual I call for repair on a Sunday, and I am told it is not going to be fixed until Tuesday.
We have an antique remote terminal (DSLAM / channel bank) by Ruby, WI that still is running on 1.5 megabit copper T-spans back to Gilman, and by my best guess the channel bank hardware was probably installed sometime back in the 1970s, and the DSLAM in 2000 or so.
Pictures and discussion of our old telco technology:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20533172-Rural-Century-Telephone-remote-terminal-unit
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20530745-Name-of-this-pole-mount-outdoor-telco-canister
The T-span capacity has been "in exhaust" for at least five years, and no one can get new DSL service out here because the remote terminal can't handle any more users.
When we bought the house across the road, I went through some special hoops to make sure the DSL service would be transferred to us and not disconnected, because we would have not gotten it back, due to the unending waiting list for DSL service out here.
Occasionally we get a lightning storm, the DSLAM appears to go into "safe mode" and everyone's DSL out here stops working.
Though it is a bit more complicated than to say just "it stops working".. The Internet becomes almost completely unusable. The speed drops to about 0.0005% of normal, and only things like DNS lookups and ping works, but actual page/data loading does not work. The DSL remains unusable until I call CenturyLink and go through the whole rigmarole of getting a local technician out to reset the terminal or whatever it is they do to fix it. And every time I call for repair, the automated repair service says "no problems were detected" -- it is useless and cannot detect this problem with your hardware.
It is now 7pm on Tuesday and the DSL is now working again, and as usual they do not need to even come to our house to fix it. The problem is not at our house, it is that ancient telco hardware by Ruby that needs to be replaced, but which no one at CL wants to spend money to fix.
We need fiber to be trenched / bored back to Gilman but CenturyLink refuses to do anything about it. I have made several attempts to get something done, and some manager internally in CL appears to be blocking it.
But I do get it. We don't have the high population density to make giving us gigabit Internet or gasp even FTTH and GPON / Metro Ethernet worth CenturyLink's time.
I have even tried to get a dedicated business line installed such as 3 megabit bonded-T, knowing that this would cost hundreds per month, and have been told by CL Business that this is impossible, the capacity of the trunk lines are fully exhausted.
Your company sucks and your multi-state billion dollar monopoly on crappy service needs to be broken up like AT&T was decades ago.
We would get better service if we had an independent local telephone company like Bloomer Telephone http://www.bloomer.net/internet-services-2/internet-services/ or Citizens Connected https://citizens-tel.net/ which both have fiber everywhere and they don't whine about the installation costs of fiber like CenturyLink does..
It is plainly obvious why this is. As an independent telco, their service area is small, so they must concentrate their spending on themselves. CenturyLink meanwhile has huge profitable metro areas across multiple states to upgrade with gigabit fiber to the home.
Who cares about the rural customers? CenturyLink sure doesn't.
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