How bad is your service?

We had a dead land line for over a week until they finally managed to fix it.

Then our internet went out. Day 12 now.

Apparently the cables are old and are in need of replacement here. 

It seems as if I am dealing with customer service about once every two months now. 

I have had it with CenturyLink. How is Cox? 

My service was really bad.  Too many bad stories with them to go in to them all.  

I only had phone service with them.  The incident that finally convinced me to stop service with them was one of their phone junction boxes in my neighborhood got damaged by an over flowing wash.  The water took the cover off the box and filled the box with debris.  After that every time it rained many customers in the neighborhood would loose phone service, including me.  For some reason CenturyLink would never fix that junction box.  They would just find another line that worked and move those customer's who lost service to a line that works.  Same thing every time it rained.  This went on for a couple of years.  One day my neighbor told me my service and his service was out.  He put in a service request to CenturyLink to fix both lines.  A CenturyLink tech came out and fixed my neighbor's line but not mine.  I even spoke to the tech while he was in my yard working on the phone lines.  We find out since I did not put in the service request for my line CenturyLink would not fix it.  I called and cancelled my service and made them give me a refund for the known days that I was without service.

I have been told their service techs are union and they get credit for the number of service tickets closed whether they fixed the problem or not.

Your experience with CenturyLink sounds about right.  I am not sure how they stay in business.

Cox is better and more expensive , customer service sucks with both. They do what they want when they want and all they care about is getting paid .

So the tech that was here yesterday gives me his number to call if I have any questions.

The Internet has been out for almost two weeks now. You cannot just schedule a work order, you have to deal with a call center for about 30-45 minutes first. The tech shows up. He is cool. Most are. He screws around for almost two hours at the address box and the junction box. The one in this town is fucked apparently.

So it turns out that the lines are so bad in this area that they need to put in a new copper line?

So when this new line is hooked up do I need to schedule a new appointment with a tech to ensure that the Internet is hooked up? Or will it just magically fix itself?

Central Services

If you can get cox. Do it now. Do not waste anymore time with Centurylink. Both have shitty customer service but at least cox's internet is fast and really does not go down for long when it does go down. Which is not often. Do not rent a cable modem. Just go buy one and call and give the cox tech the mac address on the modem.

This is bullshit. I am wasting a day sitting around the house to see whether or not CenturyLink even shows up.

If I ran my company like this I would be out of business. 

The vast problems with Century Link continue to be a broken record. They are as bad as it gets out here. Have been for a long while - even dating back to when they were Qwest and what not.

Cox, the exact opposite. Lived in the valley my entire life. Since their cable internet first debuted out here in the ‘90s, they’ve continued to be the best option for a high speed internet provider. While I’ve regularly had a different TV provider, Cox has always been a no brainer for Internet.

As someone else already said, if you can get Cox, do it now.

Techs, plural, just showed up.

CenturyStink is a fucking joke. They oversold/overcharged us for a service speed they couldn't provide. Western WiMax is available in my area, so we switched to them, saved a crap ton of money, and got reliable service.

I have CenturyLink at both home and office. Sucks at both. Constantly slow and terrible customer service. Sometimes it seems to not even work at all.

Based on what I'm reading in this thread, I'll be switching to Cox now.

Well, they fixed the internet. We have three lines in the house. Phone, fax, and internet. I am certain that one of three will be out again within the next 45 days. 

And, why exactly aren’t you canning them?

Over a barrel. It only hurts a little. 

Talking with the neighbors to find out which provider is best. They all suck here apparently.

Where are you located around?

You said Cox is available in your area, correct?

I can already tell you without question that there is no ISP faster than Cox in your market/this market in general.

Not sure what any of your neighbors that ever actually had Cox could negatively have to say about their service in comparison to other local ISPs. I mean, as someone else mentioned, their CS (if you ever actually have to use it) is meh, but that’s the common denominator with everyone these days. Perhaps they just had one of their minuscule 15 meg packages or something. Can’t really think of anything other than that.

I’ve got their 300 meg tier, and it’s retarded fast. I average well over 300 megs. You usually get more than what you pay for - the exact opposite of Century Link. They even have a 1 gig “gigablast” tier in some areas. Stupid fast.

And, to further explain why I’d have to sincerely doubt any of your neighbors having a legit beef regarding Cox’s internet speeds...their technology is entirely different than CenturyLink’s. It’s not about how close you are to a hub or whatever. If you are eligible for Cox service, you have full access to their entire bandwidth of internet service. The sole exception being their new fiber optic gigablast service. That’s only available in very limited areas currently. But with that one exception, no matter where you live, your bandwidth is guaranteed. You have their 150 meg tier, you’ll get at least 150 megs. You have their 300 meg tier, you’ll get at least 300 megs. Etc. This is also why there isn’t even a debate on this subject. You know exactly what you’re gonna get with Cox. And, no, I don’t work for Cox, nor have I ever worked for them or any other provider in that field. I just like being educated on the things I spend money on.

So, no, “they don’t all suck” there.

Fuck, man. I have been through enough already. 

Switch to cox, better service, reliability and speed.  Will not get better service or price.  Worth it though.

Had them for a few years. One of my biggest complaints is that the DVR has died twice. Which means everything you have recorded goes away and you can't transfer them to the new box. 

Several years ago, had some issues with Cox. So I figured I'll show them and switched to Century Link. WORST MISTAKE EVER.

Had issues all the time. Phone out, TV out, internet had perpetual buffering.

Call and get them to send a tech out. Tell them to have the tech contact us. 3 hours later get a text on our phone and says job is complete.

Check the TV, Phone or internet. Still broken. How the hell can the tech fix it if he never knocked on our door.

Finally got so bad we just gave up and went back to Cox. Much happier now.

Century Link customer service makes Cox customer service seem great by comparison, I didn't think that was possible as I had Cox for over a decade.

I would switch back but Cox wants to drill into the house and run lines for their stupid super hyperspeed or whatever BS they call it.   The same on my next door neighbors seem to have endless problems with...

Here's the thing, speed is overrated.  Most if not all sites throttle you down anyway to keep one user from hogging all the bandwidth.  You want reliability and good latency.  The exact things that are hard to quantify so everyone just advertises stupid speed numbers.

CenturyLink is really, really bad. I was in a similar situation - an area with very old wiring that needs to be replaced.

A few years ago it was getting to the point where the repair guy was out once a week. He just gave me his
cell # and said to skip calling support, it was that bad. He confirmed the wiring was bad all over the area,
and they'd rather replace 20' of bad wire five times than put in good wire once. He was also very frank,
said the writing was on the wall that cell phones had won the race, landline subscribers were declining
and they had zero incentive to retain customers, and to not expect service to improve.

Cox sucks too, but way less than CenturyLink. Not an option for me. If CenturyLink were my only
option I think I'd probably just go without.

FWIW, after a few other things I switched to cell only phone service and a decent local WISP for internet.

Speed is not overrated. You’re only throttled down after a certain point. A point in which you create, and not those around you.

I can test my speed and latency every single day. It remains consistent. Again, your speeds with Cox are guaranteed. You get exactly what you pay for, and most often, more.

Everyone I know living in the valley proper has Cox internet. I couldn’t find one of them to complain about the service if I wanted to. It just is what it is. Not really sure who’s having to deal with their customer service, either. I have had Cox internet since the 90’s. I’m never dealing with their customer service. Sure, there’s occasional outages that may randomly occur for one minute to a half hour at most - when they’re upgrading some wiring or whatever in your area. But I never call customer service in those instances. I just know that the internet will be back up and running again in no time. That’s the absolute worst of what you have to deal with with them. And, it’s no big deal at all for me to temporarily switch from WiFi to the LTE network on my phone for a brief time during those periods. So, actually, I never lose internet at all.

Couldn’t tell you anything about their landlines. I have one bundled in with my service, but I’ve never used it. I don’t even know someone with a landline these days. Even my 60 plus year old parents, aunts, uncles, and 80 plus year old grandparents don’t have landlines any longer. Perhaps that’s where people are having problems? I dunno. Can’t really think of anything else. Perhaps old, shitty equipment - routers, modems, etc? Well, people need to upgrade their equipment occasionally, just like most anything else.

You might be a neighbor of mine. The usual techs didn’t show up this time. The techs don’t have any problem listening to us bad mouth their employer.

No offense, but 100% of your services can be done -- better -- over TCP/IP, in this new century.  Get Cox.  I have them and hate them.  But its all I can get out here, besides Century (aka Qwest aka Qworst aka Ma Bell).  They're even more terrible, as you've seen.

Have it at the family cabin in Pine.  Get about 1.2-2.3 down and .1-.3 up depending on the season, temperature outside and of the wires where the sun might hit.  It goes out regularly... i know because i get disconnected warnings when our webcam there goes offline.

only alternatives are sat and suddenlink.  Thinking about suddenlink because anything DSL lately just seems to be degrading.. never getting better.

I have had good luck with CL, but I was living near Sedona and now in Clarkdale. I am getting @ 34Mbps consistently and service has never dropped out except when the power has gone out. The only issue I originally had was switching their modem / router over to bridged mode so that it would act as just a modem and work with my Linksys router. Their router wouldn't let me configure port forwarding or any specialized applications. Once I figured that out everything has been good.

Cox has been fast and reliable everywhere I've had it.

Because the way their equipment/network is, your speed is guaranteed. Hence why literally no one else can compete.

What area?

the speed you get from a testing site is not the same as the speed you get pulling from content servers on the web...  besides, unless you are doing mass downloads of files off the web which probably means you are doing something under the table with torrents, how much more speed do you need beyond pulling hi def movies.

With CL I get 14 to 16 Mbps, that will easily support two HD video feeds and browsing on another two devices.  It is very rarely I feel any of download speeds are slow and much more likely to be upstream issues.  My big issue is reliability, it completely sucks with the internet disconnecting at least several times a day if not every hour.

Scottsdale/ TPV

Our household even noticed a difference going from 150 megs to 300 megs. And, that’s just from HD streaming, On Demand services, running a 4 TV Contour setup (ties into the broadband), typical WiFi and WiFi printers and whatnot, and usual web browsing and downloading. Nothing too out of the ordinary. I remember when we had a 50 meg connection. Personally, we would not want to go back to even anywhere near that. Speed is certainly not overrated to us. Streaming in particular is a world of difference. Max picture quality constantly and instantly, no buffering/buffer time, isn’t ever cutting out or lagging up at certain points. Well worth it to us. As always, to each their own.

The internet is not a truck, it is a series of tubes.

I work from home and sometimes move ridiculously large files.

Then you likely know even more than I. I feel for those forced into CenturyLink service. We didn’t even make it a week. And, that was a rough week. Last time cheaper prices lure me away. Always been a buy once cry once kinda guy. For good reason.

Just ran a few different speed tests from my phone on WiFi while in my backyard.







Can’t complain.