CenturyLink review: speed issues 13

Internet service is slow, and it cuts out at least 3 times a day at my work and my home!

dospp,

My name is Joey and I'm with CenturyLink. I'm sorry to read about the trouble you're having with our service. I'll be glad to help look into the issue for you. Just email me at Joey@CenturyLink.com with your name, account information and reference your post here on Complaintsboard.com. Thanks.

Joey H
CenturyLink Customer Outreach
Reachout@CenturyLink.com

I have had problems ever since I went ti dsl with century link. I have been told all kinds of wild things. Seems like they have bit off more than they can chew.

I to have issues with Century Link. Performance and speed degrade through out the day. They have frequent DNS server problems. If you connect to a corporate VPN your speeds will reduce by 50% on a good day. I have several colleagues like myself who work from home. We all have the same cloned laptops, but different ISPs. We checked our speeds at Speedtest.net while connected to VPN. No one experienced any loss except your's truly. I am the only one connected to Century Link. Their answer is to sell me their router/modem combo for 5.00 /month. Their supporrt people say they will escalate to engineers, but when you call back days later to check status, , no one has any record you called in with a problem and they never follow-up. It is a constant battle. They have cleverly set up their own speed test in their sandbox. If you use internet speed tests and get poor results they have you check in their sandox. If all is well then you are SOL. This in itself is bovine scatology. They are supplying us with the pipeline to internet. They have obvious problems in that pipeline. But to test they never go into that pipeline. I started with this outfit when it was Sprint, in the very early days of Broadband. It was fine. Then Sprint sold to Embarq and over time things started to degrade. Embarq sold to Century Link and it is geting much much worse. Overall this is a terrible company that offers a poor product, with abysmal support and it seems no plans to upgrade their backbone and hardware. I left them 1 year ago for cable. They convinced me to return with a promise that their problems were fixed and increased my B/W to 10Mb/s. I was dumb enough to do it. I have 2 months left on their 1 year contract and I am gone, never to return. I have often wondered if the state law enforcement or consumer protection should get involved. They are charging for a product that do not reliably deliver nand frankly if you are not a heavy user, you may not realize you are geting screwed.

I've got the same thing going on as 19ertim above. Pay for 5Mbps, and all of a sudden I'm getting ~1Mbps (even low-quality YouTube has to constantly buffer). Never had this problem in 5 years with Qwest, but two months after it becomes CenturyLink, I get this. Spoke with a "Ben" in Utah, and he basically offered nothing. Told me that he could see the modem, and it showed fine, and I should run anti-virus software. When I asked him why I was getting 4Mbps on his "sandbox" site - and 1Mbps everywhere else, he had no answer, and nothing to say. So, I'm going to give Verizon some money, and use my cellphone as a tether modem, and cancel everything with CenturyLink - including land line. The 4 gig limit will encourage me to stream less video anyway. :)

To add a follow up to my note above, I guess these boards are monitored sometimes - as I received an e-mail from CenturyLink almost immediately after my post stating that they wanted to help try to solve the issue. I explained the problems (slow speed on all sites excepting their own) and the tech did work with me to try to get it resolved. The tech was much more professional, and after taking a few trips up some blind alleys and kicking things around with a senior tech, they tried switching me out to entirely different equipment in their DSLAM that was fiber fed. That did the trick, and I'm now ~4.5Mbps everywhere I journey on the net. Very much appreciate that they contacted me, and we got it resolved before I discontinued service.

I am having similar problems. I can't watch any youtube videos without buffering for long periods of time and I can't watch Netflix videos through my Roku player without several long pauses. I've called CS in the past and they weren't able to do anything about it. I ran a speedtest and the results were horrible. 0.23 Mb/s - 0.35 Mb/s Graded F on Speedtes.net.

As a business customer, I had quickly found out how inept and deceptive this company is. The first shot across the bow is it took 4 months to even get service changed over. They were to send me documents upon request to make the appropriate changes from my current provider. I called two months later asking what happened. Of course, no one knows. Then at that time, for the services I requested, I was quoted $75 per month for the first year, then $95 the next two years, which included 10M internet service. Sounds good. Too good to be true as I have found out. From the first day of service, I had erratic internet speeds, nothing close to 10M and occasional noise in the phone lines. Eventually the noisy phone service was corrected by changing to another pair of wires in the cable drop, but the internet speed issue will not be corrected. At least in the hear future anyway. Upon conversation with the linesmen and techs, the infrastructure here only supports 3M regularly, and can boost up to 4M if they push it. This was the first lie they told. The second was that they conveniently did not mention the additional charges they impose. One of which is a $6.49 router fee, for a puny box you can buy at the store for $30-$40. That means that I will pay them roughly $78 per year or $234 for three years for this $30 item. I called Centurylink to complain about the router fee. After a lengthy conversation, I was told that the fee would be dropped. The next month's billing, the router fee was still there! so, I called again, but to be told now that the fee is "mandated" since January 2011. I eventually spoke to one of their "supervisors", or I think it was another term they used for this now. This person was definitive in her stance to keep the charges as they are, and did not feel sympathetic in the least as to how I've been treated to date. I explained how long it took to even receive service, the services I was promised with the prices given and I even stated how I requested a written contract 3-4 times, and was eventually told that there were no written contracts. How is that legally binding between two corporations? Doesn't this type of agreement, for businesses, leave a large gap for interpretation and unwarranted service changes and fees that were not originally agreed to? What recourse does either party have with such an agreement? It appears that Centurylink's legal staff has worked tirelessly ensuring that their personnel parse their words properly, ensuring that their statements carefully step along the edge between legally safe and unethical. I caution everyone to carefully consider other options they may have before falling into the trap. Sometimes you have no choice, but in others you may be better served looking elsewhere.

ive had the same runaround with centurylink as many of these people have.my dsl is slow and my connection gets dropped all the time.this has been an ongoing problem for 2 years now.i called them several times, amd they sent a tech out every time, only to say the lines are fine.the last tech.said the problem is too many people watching netflix movies and overloading their equipment .then they gave me a repair date of november 30th.that was the first year, and then again the second year.the last time i called they had no records of my complaints, same story for everybody.this way they dont have to give any discounts.oh what a corrupt company.i turned them in to consumer protection, but never heard any more about it.i think we need a good lawyer and start a mass law suit against this crooked company.unfortunately, they are the only internet available in my area, or i would have dropped them over a year ago.

I am having many problems with centurylink at the moment. My slow Internet speed has been a real problem in the last week. I was in the middle of an online test for one of my college courses and the Internet dropped completely. After all my hard work and study, I received an F grade because I was unable to finish the test. My college allows for no retakes. I now drive over an hour to my campus to take online tests so I do not receive another failing grade thanks to centurylink. It costs about twenty dollars worth of gas to drive to campus each time. I have four to five quizzes a week and one to two tests a month. These tests and quizzes are only open on certain days so I can't just do them all in one trip. To make matters worse, my Internet speed has dropped so that I cannot even watch my online video classes. This equates to many hours a month spent driving back and forth at a cost of twenty dollars per trip. Centurylink has become a nightmare. I have no other Internet available in my area. I have friends in Russia that enjoy much better Internet service. This is ridiculous.

I have had centurylink DSL since 2006 and it only works right half of the time. I pay for 10 MBPS download speeds, but most of the time it is as slow as dial up. I have to call customer service every other month to complain about the speeds and they keep saying the problem is my computer or the phone line in my house. Well, first of all, I am a computer tech for over 20 years, 2nd, I have replaced the phone lines in my house twice. 3rd, My laptop works on the same service at work at 10 MBPS but when I try to use it at home when I connect to DSL it is very slow and locks up. I have plugged the DSL directly to the phone box outside the house and it still does not work properly, but every time I call and complain about it, suddenly they temporarily fix it and it works fine for about 2 weeks then slows back down again. It is obvious that century-link does not know what they are doing and try to blame the customer for the problems.

I myself been a 11 year customer of them I aggree had good services until centurylink took over Embarq I have had so many problems with my internet losing services and my rocky boxes buffing and even on my iPad having to use my verizon account and not my wifi at home because of the services but when u call it's always the same Ol we will send a tech out Ya like i can keep missing work for this I wish I could find another provider but of course where we live there's isn't another one

My Centurylink internet drops so low around 7 pm every night I am unable to do anything on my computer. This has been going on for over two months, the tech people came out during the day when it runs fine, said I had a short in the box. I know this is not the problem and there was no short. I have read so many others for a long time have had the same problem. My speed as of right now is: ping= 79 download = 0.29 upload 0.42 this is by Ookla. I get the same no mater what speed test I do.