As a former customer this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.

Our neighborhood and its twisted pair is 50 years old. I had DSL from the moment it first became available, and over time they upgraded the speeds. I have been WFH since 2006.

During that time I had had multiple cases of DSL going down and in many cases a new modem cured it.

But suddenly, during the Pandemic, the modem started losing its link 1-5 times a day every day. Totally unacceptable. I called multiple times. They came out multiple times. They weren’t able to find a problem on their end even after multiple visits and we had eliminated the problem being on my end.

It’s like nobody had any ownership of the issue or any sense of duty to proactively troubleshoot the problem to resolution. They almost treated every call as an isolated momentary issue despite having the prior info and me relaying it. They would just come out, do a line test, and when everything looked ok, they would shrug and leave. And the problems would continue as before.

Perhaps it was an intermittent hardware fault in the CO. Perhaps it was just old copper they were unwilling to spend any money on upgrading. I found I wasn’t alone. A few others had the same issue in the neighborhood too.

I’m on brand new fiber now with a different provider and reliability is orders of magnitude better as one might expect.

But yeah, fuck CenturyLink.

My hatred for CenturyLink is only 2nd to what Suddenlink put my family through. It took an FCC complaint against Suddenlink for them to come fix our phone lines/Internet/security system that were all down for a full month before they actually came to fix it. They had to actually reply to the FCC complaint within 10 days.

I only made that complaint after a Suddenlink worker said that there wasn’t an outage like we had thought for the last 3 weeks. They then said the automated message that stated “your location has an outage” was fake and just what they were using to stop people from calling.

We worked from home and had to rely on mobile hotspots. Was all during covid so it was even harder for going out to have a safe place to work.

I love the stock image of an ethernet cable with only phone capabilities having continuity. Good choice from whoever made that decision.

I’ve been in the communications industry for almost 30 years & I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything good about CenturyLink.

the ILEC not giving a sh;it about a reseller’s customer on their network? surprise surprise.

A company finally engaging in something resembling customer service or doing their fucking job after being contacted by journalists threatening to expose their behavior? That’s never happened before and certainly won’t happen again. /s

Note to self, never use a reseller. Ever.

Not being funny but this is hardly criminal, what would a 86 year old do without Internet?

Unless something is life threatening, we’ve had towns without Internet for a month due to contractor cutting the fibre.