I recently purchased a home in a rural community. The MLS listing said that High Speed Internet was available. I asked who it was through and was told CenturyLink. I looked up the address on their website and confirmed that it said DSL was available. I made an offer on the house, bought it, moved-in, and proceeded to order service. The website now said it wasn't available. A rude customer support agent told me it wasn't available. His supervisor (after placing me on hold for literally 30+ minutes while researching why it wasn't available) told me that the system's ports were all in use and so they couldn't add any one. She said she had emailed the regional planner to find out when an upgrade was expected and took my phone number promising to call me back when she got a reply. A week or two later, having never been called back, I called in again. After being transferred up the food chain a couple of times, the agent offered to go ahead and place the order for the service and see if it would go through. She said if it was successful that it would be installed LAST Tuesday. Later that day she called me back and informed me that, no, it would not be installed because the system was "in exhaust".
So Black Friday rolled around and I ordered a Verizon LTE modem. It arrived on this Tuesday. Also arriving on this Tuesday was a lot of "static" on our phone line when my wife tried to make a phone call. That evening when I got home, I answered an incoming phone call and instantly recognized the static as DSL signaling. I dug our my old AT&T dsl line filters and modem and hooked them up. I instantly got a DSL link. Max speed down 1792 kbps, max speed up 320; SNR 29.5; LNATTN 20.5; frame loss 0; ADSL Line Sync passed, ATM Cell Delineation passed, ATM Signal passed, OAM segment ping failed, OAM end to end ping passed, DSL Ethernet to ATM passed; DSLAM Vendor 4946544e, line mode ANSI, DSL training mode = multimode, VPI 8, VCI 35, vc encapsulation LLC, line type = interleaved, interleave depth = 2. All I needed was a ppoe username and password.
I called internet tech support at CenturyLink. He obviously fully believed me that I had DSL signaling and link-up but couldn't explain why because there were no orders to install it and no indications on my account that it was installed. He couldn't issue me an account, only sales could do that ... during normal business hours.
I literally wanted to reach through the phone and strangle the college kid working sales the next morning who kept saying "we'll just have to agree to disagree on that" because there was no way I had DSL signaling on my line, I just had static from moisture in the line and he could transfer me to voice repair to have them come out and take care of the noise. He refused to transfer me to his supervisor. He refused to transfer me to Internet support "because they will not talk to you because you do not have internet service", he would only transfer me to voice repair. The lady at voice repair listened to what I told her, apologized for the previous guy being so rude to me and transferred me to the internet support line...after quite a while on the line with them and with the agent conferring with his supervisor, he said that since the system was in exhaust all they could do was transfer me back to voice repair and have them send someone out to find out why/how it had gotten hooked up to the DSL system. Voice repair put in an order for a tech to come out in 24 hours "to investigate static on my line... (and it would be helpful if you are there so he can have access to your network equipment)". The local technician called this morning, said he is the one that does all the work in the area. Knew where my house was located at. Said nothing had been done that would have caused the DSL signaling to suddenly show up on my line, but he would be happy to come out and remove it. I told him I didn't want it removed, I wanted a username and password so I could USE it. He said, he couldn't get me one because the system is in exhaust and has insufficient bandwidth to support existing customers. He said even when existing customers are disconnected for non-payment they can't get back on. He said he would write down my name and number and would contact me "if they ever take the system out of exhaust".
Having come from being a long time customer of AT&T - who installed service same day, and who brought a new modem to my door at 6AM after my existing one died the night before, I can't begin to say how frustrated I am with CenturyLink at this point.
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