Century Link Internet — extremely slow internet service
I was a first time computer buyer and needed an internet service for my new computer. Unfortunately I had no idea about internet service and, living in rural Missouri, only had a few choices. Unfortunately I picked Century Link because they offered the lowest rate. After getting everything hooked up and operating, I subscribed to Netflix which is the most awesome service available on the internet. I tried to stream Netflix to my house but was constantly interrupted and the streaming would stop, then start again in a few minutes or a lot of minutes. I contacted Netflix and they determined the speed of my so-called Century Link High Speed DSL Internet to be about .48 mpps. Netflix advised that they needed to run at 1.5 mpps which is not too much to ask for. After contacting Century Link several times (Their administrative section is typical and imposssible to reach and deal with) they told me there was nothing they could do as my internet would only run at .5 mpps. This is slow-speed internet and it totally unacceptable. Please do yourself a favor and stay away from Century Link at all costs.
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My name is Joey and I'm with CenturyLink. I'm sorry to read about the trouble you've had with our company and would be happy to look into the issue for you. You can email me at [email protected] and be sure to include your name, account number and reference your complaint on this website. Thanks.
Joey H
CenturyLink Customer Outreach
[email protected]
Help from century link, yeah right!
I pay for 5 Meg service and I have been getting the right speed for the past 4 years, and for the past 2-3 weeks I get around 2 Meg, tested with www.speedtest.net, I Emailed CS twice, once last week and they avoided to fix the problem by saying do this and that to your PC to make it run better, and I am still waiting for an answer from my last Email I sent 4 days ago.
They're switching to fiber optic in my area (Las Vegas) and since the, regular internet service is slow as hell and CL don't want to work on it, and the only way to switch to Fiber Optic is to get a $150 bundle with TV..., which I won't do since I have DTV.
For now I'm waiting for the fiber optic service to be available as a stand alone deal, then I'll upgrade, until then I'll have to deal with slow internet and zero CS help.
SRT Rules,
I would be happy to look into your issue also. Can you email me at [email protected]? Be sure to include your name, account number and reference your complaint here on ComplaintsBoard.com. Thanks.
Joey H
CenturyLink Customer Outreach
[email protected]
Joey H took care of my problem, techs came and rewired the lines so that I now have dedicated phone and DSL lines with no filters, and now I get 5Meg, so thanks Joey for taking care of it, and the techs knew their stuff.
There is an easy way to handle your problem; maybe you can try the software "tuneup360". My friends and I all use it, which can help you fix all the problems you may encounter.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1129857573.png
and im paying $50 a month for 1.5 mb
Matthew G,
My name is Joey and I'm with CenturyLink. I'm sorry to read about the trouble you're having with your service. If you email me at [email protected] with your name, account number and reference your post here on Complaintsboard.com I'll be happy to look into your issue. Thanks.
Joey H
CenturyLink Customer Outreach
Agree - our netflix and xbox live connection is constantly going down. It knocks us off probably 5 times during a movie. We're paying for 10 MB and according to speed tests it's less than 3. Have called customer service before and they insists it's anything but their service. I have tried shorter phone cords, resetting the router, replacing the router... everything. Frustrated.
I am in Wise County, TX, and we too have CenturyLink DSL. We are in a rural area, and I understand that our speeds won't be as fast as in some areas. HOWEVER, the last few months, it has slowed to a crawl. We just got a test reading today of 60kb. The service we're paying for is 1.5MB, although we were told in our location we would only get 768kb. Whenever we've called customer service, while they are polite, they always act like they are surprised we're having a problem, and they will check into it. Turns out hundreds of people are having problems with CenturyLink, and that's just the ones that bother to post online. Today I called, and got the same initial reaction - "sorry to hear you're experiencing a problem, we'll check into it. Oh, I see there is an issue with slow speed in your area, but technicians are working on it and should have it resolved shortly". Then, I told her the connection has been slowing down for months, and I've checked online, and know how many other people are having problems with their CenturyLink service. At that point, she admitted there is an ongoing problem, and she receives weekly updates on it. She receives weekly updates, but she's just now seeing there's a problem? Really?
So, we're paying for a level of service we're not getting, problem one, and problem two, CenturyLink pretends not to know there is a problem, when there is a lot of evidence to the contrary - just google CenturyLink slow connection. Unfortunately, they seem to have a monopoly on high speed service at the moment.
At this point, I would recommend those who have other options to take a good look at them before settling for CenturyLink.
My service with CenturyLink is awful as well. I subscribe to 10 Mbps and am lucky if I get 500 kbps. CenturyLink obviously knows what is going on. They should inform their phone techs. I think we might to start a class action suit against them. They are not giving us what we are paying for.
jmpmusic,
I'm also sorry to read about the trouble you're having with your DSL service. Ill be glad to help if you email me at [email protected] with your name, account number and reference your post here on Complaintsboard.com. Thanks.
Joey H
CenturyLink Customer Outreach
[email protected]
mine will work fine for a few hours then i goes down to .5kbs i am paying for 10mbs and i just bought a new laptop and my ps3 lags down pick your game up once cableis avail im gone i dont care if you fix it or not n joey no need to write the same thing as you did for the others ive called and called nothing changes i jus want to pay for what im getting
I am a hardcore online gamer and I have centurylink and bottom line is they SUCK!!!
i am in the military as well and everyone here on base that has them also would agree they SUCK!!!
I have 10MB speed with CL and have a personal laptop & work desktop PC in my home as well as PS3. My work PC has to be a wired connection so the Cisco Gateway Router is in my small bedroom/office next to my Work PC. So, when I'm on my laptop any where else in my house, the speed/connection is worse than any dialup I've ever had.. What's worse is I brag that I have 10MB nut my mom has basic 1MB (ONE) Comcast Internet Speed & her connection is constant anywhere in her home (which is exact floor plan as my home). And like all the complaints on here, tech support says its MY fault & that I could try moving my router to a more central location in my home, such as my hallway or living room--but this isn't feesible for two reasons-- I MUST have wired connection for my work PC & I do NOT want to move my Gateway Router to my hall-- my home has hardwood floors & I will NOT drill a hole in the floor & run an Ethernet cable down & under house over to my bedroom/office to straight wire to my work PC-- I shouldn't have to do this in a 1000 sq ft single level home!!! SERIOUSLY debating on switching back to Comcast Internet.. This is INSANE!!!
Wellsville, ks. Purchased a home here and ordered century link. Did not work at all for first month, Kept saying working on lines. Then it came to life for 3 weeks and now again its not working right.
I have had many services over the years, mokandial, timerwarnes and AT&T. All worked to some degree but all were stable. Centurylink is unstable. My speeds change dramaticly and sometime the whole
internet goes out. Been trying to get them to fix this for 2 months.
Can I get out of my contract if the fail to provide the service I pay for. I am paying for 10mbps and geting 1.2mbps and sometimes only 512kpbs.
Also the line quality is so bad, even at those speeds nothing works right. Remebmer, speed does not mean stable.
So far, CENTURYLINK SUCKS. WISH I NOT NEVER GOT IT. STAY AWAY. GET TOWER INTERNET OR ANYTHING BUT THESE GUYS. I AM STUCK IN A 2 YEAR CONTRACT AND NOT GETTING SERVICE!
I'm having the same slow-down issues here in Vegas. I pay for up to 10 mbps, but for the past month and a half my speeds have been more like 1 mbps! I called customer service and they sent a tech out--he determined there was no problem with any of my equipment and finally had to call someone to adjust something on their end. My speed was back for 30 minutes--but then it went back to slow. Very frustrating!
I'm in Buckner, Mo...just East of Kansas City. I, too, have experienced the Century Link farce. I live in a rural area and was excited to hear that "high speed" internet was finally in my area. It worked great for more than a year. We were able to subscribe to X-box Live and Netflix Streaming. Unfortunately, about two months ago we started experiencing the same problems many of you have. It's funny to read the tech comments that you all have posted...I've heard them all myself. When calling about the lack of speed, each time I had to jump through every hoop...restart the modem, master reset the modem, plug it in to every outlet in the house, run the speed test, run the speed test again. Each time the support person puts me through to "advanced support"...who has no record that I've ever called...so we do it all again. My last call ended with a rude support person telling me ALL my computers and consoles are crap. Nice.
I got rid of centurylink a month ago and moved to Cox cable and Internet. Man what a difference. Glad I made the move.
Western PA. Same issues as everyone else. I've even gone as far as connecting my DSL modem to the Telco box outside my home thereby eliminating home wiring. Same problems. Terrible company, poor product and abysmal support. Stay away from CL.
i moved recently to a very small texas town where i have no choice for internet. i used to live in san antonio where i had very cheap, very reliable independent dial up internet service. i just want to say if i had any choice i'd get rid of centurylink. they are a joke. my dial up in san antonio was superior to centurylink's "DSL". SLOW IS NORMAL! VERY SLOW IS ROUTINE! and after midnight they often shut down their service altogether. saving money i'm sure or they think no one needs it at that hour. dedicated server line? a sick joke.
Thought maybe getting a faster speed service would cure my problems with Centurylink...until I started looking through complaints all over the country. Western PA---top speed I can get .63mb/s down and .37mb/s up. I pay for 768 kbps...can't ever even get that. Centurylink took over for Embarq here--they changed the billing saying that what I had with Embarq didn't cross over to theier billing system. 3 months in a row I call...each time they fix the things on my bill that they claimed they fix the month before. Each month customer svc tells me the total to pay after adjustments. I pay it, the next months bill says I have a balance due...they suck. They create more confusion and problems. I can't believe anything they tell me. With embarq 768 kbps was 14.95/mo. permanent price--Cent says it's only for a year...wish I would have taken a screenshot of Embarq's deal...SNAKES
I also have issues with Century Link. I have 1.5 and am lucky to get just above dial up connection and it fluctuates a lot. I have yet to get the speed they promised. I live in a rural area in Oregon and have very little choice regarding internet service. I am looking into Satellite internet options and want to get rid of this substandard service from Century Link. I would rather pay more to get the service promised than to pay a so called deal and get 1/10 of the speed I was promised. In short Century Link service stinks!!!
I am in Loveland, Co. I pay for 20 MB speed. My problem is frequent Internet interruptions. Manually rebooting the modem usually solves the problem but it takes several minutes from rebooting till able to connect again. This can happen several times an hour sometimes. After a very unhelpful call to CL support, in which I was told I either had it hooked up wrong, didn't have the right router, my modem was bad, etc, I was rudely told that had I purchased a real Quest modem I wouldn't be having this problem. My modem says Quest right on it. I was told I would need to purchase another one and that should fix the problem. These modems are near $100 dollars on sale. I borrowed a friend's Quest modem and it does the same thing. The interruptions are causing severe problems for my online college classes. Any suggestions?
I'm with CenturyLink in Tazewell, TN. I pay for 10 Mb. After getting the internet hooked up the first thing I did was check at speedtest.net. I was getting around .5 Mb. I called tech support and they had me do a speed test at speedtest.centurylink.net, which showed 8.7 Mb. the tech told me that means I am getting what I pay for. LOL. speakeasy shows .6 Mb. Netflix won't stream HD, online gaming is a joke. Youtube takes a long time to buffer. But the techs say this is because speedtest.net and speakeasy.net have high traffic. I said "so you're telling me that speedtest.centurylink.net is fine but the rest of the internet is broken?" Eventually they agreed that the symptoms indicated a problem between their servers and the rest of the web, but told me there was nothing they could do. My parents house in a different part of the same city has 3Mb and always tests 3Mb on every speedtest site. Is it just me or does this seem like a problem with the Central Office serving my address? Obviously the line is OK or i wouldn't get full speed on Century Link servers. This needs to be fixed ASAP. I don't know what else to do. The guy who said I was getting what I was paying for was tier 2 tech support, and he was speaking with an engineer on the matter. What a rip-off...
I have 12M service and get .5M at best, CL sucks, nuff said
CL is slow and does not care, they are making a profit with the current system, so why should they fix it, that would cut into profits. Thats the america we live in now, Profits 1st. the bottom line
I live in rural Virginia, north west of Richmond. I have had "DSL" for a little over 3 years, heck maybe longer. Initially, I used a Netgear DGN-2000 router, and CL was hapless when it came to helping me, and Gearhead Services were even worse. During the first 2 years they took control of my pc twice and wiped the hard drive both times, then hung up the phone. Now the problem I have is I have a new Mac, a Westell Router and can not even stream Youtube videos. This connection is awful. When I call CL, they help out, and are very courteous on the tech side, and the system will work for about a month. Then it's back to the same slow connection again. the speed test tonight gets me: 352k download, and 131k upload, 236 ping. Now that is better than dial up, but really, not a whole lot. My fear is that every time I call, I get told that I should not have CL DSL, as I am not in the coverage area, after 3-4 years with the service, they want to tell me that I am not eligible for service? What the heck? Then to make matters worse, I will get the occasional Tech that tells me my area is slated for upgrade to higher speed, yet I never see anything.
Add to that the recent debacle my Mother-in-Law just went through. She was told she was eligible for CL DSL. So she opted for a package deal and went with the DTV package and scheduled the installation for after the internet was connected. The routers arrived, and a Tech called to assist with the installation. He had an email stating that everything was good for install. So she scheduled DTV to be installed and cancelled her Dish Network Satellite Internet for the same day. Only to be called the day before, late in the afternoon, and told that she would not be getting CL DSL. She had already disassembled her system in preparation for the new equipment, and now was not going to get it. CL came to a community meeting 2 years ago and promised to bring internet service out to us, yet it has not happened.
I have been paying for 10 MBPS internet service and it it just a waste of money! the internet is really slow and will not reach anything higher than 3 MEGS. I am very frustrated with this problem and i am about to switch to a different phone/internet Company!
I live in rural Idaho. My choices of internet are dial-up, satellite or CenturyLink DSL. The first two are slower than dirt. The DSL worked fine until the past month. It has crawled to half of what I normally get. I ran the speed test tonight. I am supposed to get 7 mbps. Tonight I got 2.589. Not even half. My sons are computer techs and have run the machines through the hoops. It isn't the computers or the router/modem. It is the DSL. I figured it was heavier on the holidays because the kids were out of school and on their computers. But it is worse than ever. Personally, I wish it was still Quest. They were more competent and friendlier than the CenturyLink employees.
I have been with century link dsl for five years now. I don't know why. I pay for 10mb service and have only had connection rates close to that a couple of times and that was only when the technician was here. Thats if you call 5mb close to 10. They have tried to blame it on the lines in my house but have dispoved that by connecting to the box on the outside of the house and still doing good to get .72mb. I have spent countless hours on the phone with them. Finally I got someone honest on the phone who told me that I was doing good to get .7mb, that there records showed average connection speeds in my area of .6mb. So why was I ever sold 10mb service if it was not possible in my area. I had comcast 20mb installed last week, have checked it daily and the slowest spped has been 23mb download and 12mb upload. Major difference and the price is actually less. The next thing is to drop them from my phone service
I am in Broomfield, CO and have been with Qwest/CenturyLink DSL for more than 5 years. I signed up for the priced for life guarantee at 1.5 MBps, Now I see my modem has the speed listed at 576 k, and since the switch to CL I have seen my rates go up. More expensive and slower is not acceptable. I ran a speed test and the results are .5 MBps download and .52 MB upload. CenturyLink, I am looking elsewhere for service unless you can do something about this.
I too am having problems. I have a work station in my home that has to be hard wired to my router. All my other computers, iPad and etc goes through my wifi and its awfully slow. Worse than when you used to use dialup. I can wait 45 seconds or more just to load a web page. Sometimes its longer. This is so unacceptable. I've only been with Century Link for 5 months and I regret ever changing to them. I wished there was a way to get out of my year contract for the poor service and for not getting what you pay for. Trussville/AL
I came to this site via a search trying to determine "why" Netflix movies are regularly interrupted during view. I am glad I did. Many of you have had the same problems. I upgraded my CenturyLink account several weeks ago to 10MB & bought a more expensive router. I live in central Louisiana and the only service available was Centurytel (now CenturyLink). I called CL and inquired about the possibility of the problem being the Westell Modem model #G90-610014-20 that was installed when Centurytel installed DSL lines several years ago of it being the problem and they assured me it was not. I will attempt to run the DSL speed test here and see what I come up with..??IF CL does NOT deliver 10 mbps that they are billing for, can the Corp be held liable?? They promise a service and charge for it even though it seems they do not have the technology to deliver...There may be a reason they cannot provide the service BUT they should inform their customers..If legal class action is warranted I would add my name to the list (On Social Sec so I would not be able to put $ but if it was successful, I would give any $ recovered to St. Jude Hospital)
They finally upgrade my neighborhood to 40 Mpbs, I bought a netgear modem and did a speed test on my internet. I was subscribed to 1.5 MPbs and my test comes out at ~500 kbs. Not sure how fast the new service will be, but not too happy with this right now. Trouble page says to check the speed on the modem and I did. Same speed. I hate living like this
Been paying for 10mb for who knows how long and been getting crappy service for the entire time. Today I finally called to find out what the deal is and come to find out they had us programmed to receive 1.5mb instead of the 10mb we have been paying for. The tech told me he would reprogram so we would get the 10mb we are paying for and to call customer service to see about getting a credit. Called customer service and both of the people I spoke with were rude! The first one gave me a one time credit of $20. I told her to keep her $20. I have been paying for a service I have not been receiving. She then put me through to her supervisor who had the nerve to tell me since I signed the 1 year contract with them for the 10mb I was actually paying the 1.5mb price so there was nothing she could do about that. However, she said she would provide a credit to the time I was not under contract. BULL CRAP I hung up! My husband said someone needs to fill a class action lawsuit against this company because no telling how many people they have done this to. So, I will be searching online for such and filling a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. Oh, I have been a CenturyTel/CenturyLink customer since 2002.
Well, I have had Qwest/CenturyLink DSL for over 15 years and I can say I have never had a problem with speed. I started out a long time ago with .768Mbps for a speed. Which was OK at the time, then I moved up to 1.5Mbps and then 7Mbps and I now sit at 12Mbps. I am running a home network that most people wish they had. 10 machines on 2 networks 1 private and 1 public. I run 3 Servers 24/7/365 and I am not cheap here either. 1 web server, 1 mail server, and 1 SQL server and everything just fly's here. This is just my experience and I hope others have it as well.
Deforest, WI (outside Madison, WI)...and CL acknowledges that 3.8mbps is what you get. I'm a 10 year customer, but will have to cancel all service. What a hassle. I can't imagine how they would expect to keep customers with 3.8. Golly!
I was with another company before and I was having anxiety over the way it disconnected and connected every ten minutes and I would have to reconnect onto my Wi-Fi, so we changed to Centurylink, which is ten times worse. It is the slowest. Even worse then the antique AOL dialup. I have no desire to wait for ten minutes for a Google search to come up then another ten minutes when clicking on the link. And the costumer service representatives are of no help. They say my tablet, phone and even the router (which was supplied by them) is the problem.
I have CenturyLink here in Fayetteville, NC and it is so bad. I pay 70 a month for 10 mbps Down and .3 mbps Up. We have tried to upgrade past that towards 25 mbps, but "That's not available in your area", and my "10 mbps download" is more around 5 mbps on a good day. I'm so tired of trying to get through customer service, and getting the run around. Stay as far away from CenturyLink as possible, worst ISP I have ever had
This is my 10 mbps connection: http://www.speedtest.net/result/4174342439.png