Forewarning: This is a rant, because I just gotta get it out of my system. If you don't want to read my complaining about my extremely crappy service, feel free to back out now. I won't hold it against you. :) If, on the other hand, you also have crappy CenturyLink service, you may actually feel better after reading this, because I bet that it isn't as bad as mine... ;)
So, most of you probably already know that CenturyLink has atrocious customer service and support, but the recent experiences I've had with them are even worse than their already bad reputation would suggest. What follows is just one out of many other bad experiences, but this one ranks among the worst, certainly.
First of all, yes, I live in a rural area that is also one of the most underserved areas in the country, namely southeast Ohio. I have phone and DSL from CenturyLink, formerly Embarq, formerly GTE, formerly many many other companies that came and went before I had a chance to even learn their names. I get speeds all the way up to a blisteringly fast 0.4Mbps on a good day, but on average it hovers around 0.3, with latency fluctuating wildly between 120ms and 5000ms, depending on if anyone else in the house is using the internet at all or not. The copper lines it runs on are ancient--they are the same lines that were here when I was born in 1982, and they have been spliced god knows how many times (the road grater usually ends up cutting them at least once a year, because they are buried less than 3 inches underground right next to the road) but never replaced. On top of that, our house is the very last one on the loop, a good 3 miles from the head-end.
All of that adds up to a connection that is terrible at best, and completely unusable at worst. But lately it has been getting even worse than usual. Static on the phone so bad I can't hear anything else, constant DSL modem disconnections, and 15-20% packet loss when it does manage to connect.
So, after checking for problems here with my own equipment and connections (there weren't any) I first tried to open a repair ticket online. This was probably mid-October, around the 17th I think. Well, I got to the end of the process, and an error appeared on the website that said something like "Scheduling service appointments is not available. Try again later." Or some such. Ok, fine. So I go to the neighbors to use their phone to call them. They said they will send someone out, but they are very busy so it'll be sometime next week.
Yeah, next freaking week. They couldn't give me even a specific day, let alone a time frame. But, as it turns out, that really wouldn't have mattered, because next week came and went, and no tech ever appeared. So I call them back and apparently it was rescheduled to November 1st. Thanks for letting me know....
Well, that day passed and still nothing! So call em back again, and guess what? Yup, they rescheduled it AGAIN to November 13th! At this point, I pretty much just have up, because what else can I do? Anyway, I was pretty sure no one would show up on the 13th anyway, and sure enough I was right. Didn't bother calling them back this time....
....Until today, that is. Because apparently the problem that they didn't bother to fix the first time I called just couldn't hold itself together any longer and everything died, no dial tone, no internet, and now it is also affecting other households on the same road.
Well, I called them from my neighbor's house again (for some reason, hers never goes out, whereas mine's been out at least 6 times this year, and I lose my DSL connection nearly every day in the wee hours of the morning, which was happening even before this recent problem) and I find out that the original ticket I made and gave up on was still open, they just reschedule it again to November 24th! Well, that's not good enough, I tell them. We don't have any service here at all. But can they reschedule my appointment to a time closer to the present? Of course not! Apparently, they can only delay appointments further into the future, not move them back to provide faster timely service. The absolute best thing they would deign to do for me was to make a note on the ticket stating that we want it fixed sooner than the scheduled date. :/ Wow, gee thanks.
So, I'm writing this post from my phone as best I can because I just really feel like I need to make it known that this company really does not seem to care one bit about its customers in rural area, because they know we don't have a choice. They can blow me off as much as they want and the only option I have is to pay them anyway, or cancel their service and live without phone or Internet. But for anyone else out there who has a choice, DO NOT choose this one. You will regret it, most assuredly. I regret it every minute of every day that I spend waiting in seething frustration while I wait, and wait and wait for the internet. I can't watch a YouTube video at 144p without letting it buffer ahead for a few minutes. Facebook? Nope, unusable entirely, mainly because of all the preload scripts it uses, which end up making me wait ten minutes after I log in before anything shows up. And I've had to give up PC gaming almost entirely since most PC games don't come on disc anymore. With an average game weighing in around 30-40 GB, that's nearly two weeks straight of downloading, but since other people have to use the internet here too, it's more like 4 weeks. If am downloading anything, no one else can do anything on the internet, it just times out.
This is what I get for living in a rural area... People in areas like this get forgotten or ignored, especially by telecoms, and none moreso than CenturyLink. And not only that, but I get to have my face rubbed in it too, because I get promotional fliers all the time from CenturyLink detailing all the great new tech and faster service that they keep upgrading--service that I can't get because I don't live in town. So congrats on your new super high speed 1Gbps fiber, CenturyLink. I'm glad to know that the money I pay you every month is benefitting someone else, while I don't even get a minimal level of service for the $50 a month I pay. I'd be better off burning a $50 bill every month; at least that way it would provide a small fire for a few seconds, which I could make into larger fire that I could send smoke signals with, and that would be faster and more reliable than the DSL I have now, too.
So, **** off and die, CenturyLink, I hate you so much. Just because you have a captive audience doesn't mean you can just ignore us completely and still count on that check every month. Someday, we will get a better choice, then you'll wish you'd paid attention to us when you had the chance. :|
Alright, I think I got it all out of my system.......for today, at least. ;)
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