I had to complain loudly to get this fixed. But recently they dropped my 7Mbps down to 5Mbps without notification or anything...and everywhere that my account speed is displayed in their systems shows up as 7Mbps, except of course for the modem connection admin area, which from one day to the next inexplicably started connecting at 3.98 to 5.12 and having severe packet loss.
Yesterday they sent two techs came out and verified that my connection to the junction box to my apartment complex was just fine. The techs were unable to find anything wrong on my end to charge me for an $80 repair visit, and they couldn't charge me for a new modem either when mine is the newest/latest model they have and the techs saw the same thing with their test modems that my modem did. They even replaced the line from the apartment's junction box to my apartment with a brand new one, just to be sure. But the junction box from my complex to CenturyLink was also set to 5Mbps; nothing to do with my end.
After learning that yesterday, and seeing that it was stable at 5 today, I went online to talk to support again.
They thought I should be happy with 5, which I guess I could live with if that is what I was being sold. But I have been at 7 for the entire year and that is what I'm paying for so suddenly dropping to 5 made no sense to me; I wasn't just going to throw my hands in the air and pay the same price for roughly 30% less service.
So I had to explain to the online rep why I didn't agree that 5 was "good enough" and that I shouldn't be worried about it. I told them that "up to 7" doesn't mean "up to 5"...if you're connected at 7 and it only does 5 during certain times of the day because of traffic load or something that's a a whole lot different than being advertised as up to 7 and only being connected at 5.
I then pointed out some simple math in terms big companies actually respond to...that 5/7 of ~$36/mo is ~$26/mo, so they're overcharging me $10 a month. I also mentioned that if they had a TV plan with 70 channels and suddenly dropped 20 channels without telling anyone, people would complain loudly. But the majority of people who buy broadband probably wouldn't notice the difference; so I think they dropped everyone down a tier to see what they could get away.
So after I kept nagging about it on the online help, in the end my connection to their online support dropped and suddenly I'm reconnected back at 7Mbps. No techs had to be sent out to fix it; it seems like some computer somewhere someone had purposefully changed the limit to my complex from 7 to 5, and then since I complained enough they changed it back to 7.
I guess the moral of the story is to pay attention and if something seems "off" then don't let yourself get duped into paying extra; get them to actually give you what you paid for.
They shouldn't be doing this sort of thing, but sadly this type of stuff has become somewhat commonplace for many types of service providers. It's disappointing, but sadly unsurprising.
I will say however that everyone I dealt with seemed genuine and friendly and helpful, and they did send techs out same-day to fix the packet loss, which I appreciated. And I'm happy that they resolved my problem. I'm satisfied with how it was resolved, so as long as I can stay at 7 then I'm mostly happy.
I think they just started getting new customers and the existing lines can only support so much load. But what they should be doing is lowering the advertised speeds for new customers so that they can supply what is being sold, or upgrading their lines so that they can add new customers. Rather than downgrading service for existing customers and acting like it's something on their end.
If you use CenturyLink, it wouldn't hurt to log into the modem admin and see if it's really connected at the speed you're paying for. If it's just some small-scale thing in my particular section of town then that's one thing, but if it's happening on a larger scale then more customers need to become aware of it so that we can pressure CL into making line upgrades/additional nodes a higher priority. I have family who also lives in the same area of town and uses the same service, so I will also test their connection speeds when I see them next...I did actually fix their wifi for them about 2 weeks ago and had verified that it was connected at 7 then, so if it's connected at less than 7 now then someone at CL is definitely cutting corners.
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