Goodbye and Good Riddance CenturyLink

[brutal]

FYI for anyone thinking of porting their landline number to Ooma.

Don't purchase the Premier first. Do the port add-on once you're setup and they offer the first year Premier discounted if you take their offer, which brings the total (if prepaid) to $100 instead of $120 (plus taxes of course).

Mistake I made.

[rondog]

I like CenturyLink. They give me paychecks.

[th3w01f]

However, it seems like a bit of a hassle to have to temp port a landline # to one of the carriers for a (small) fee, then port to GV since they only support direct ports from mobile.

it was a bit of a hassle but not too bad. We used an ATT go phone with 10 min on it that we picked up at Target for like $20. When we were done my mom used the same go phone to port hers.

[O2HeN2]

Oh well, this looks like as good a place as any to vent about our CenturyLink service over the last 10 days or so...

Every time you get the faintest whiff of diesel from a backhoe at the Woodmen-Union intersection, our CenturyLink landline phone goes out.

When they built the new intersection it was a monthly occurrence.

Now they're doing some infrastructure work on Union and as they approached Woodmen last week... No phone (yes, we checked at the network interface to be sure).

Called them last Wednesday and they setup a service call on Friday. Window: 9am-7:30pm. Gee, thanks, gotta sit on my hands all day waiting for you.

Tech shows up at 5pm asking all sorts of questions he should know the answers to, No, we don't have DSL, yes, we have only one line.

He bounces back and forth a couple times between our house and whatever distribution box is near the Diamond Shamrock that's West of Union on Woodmen, sharing the problems he's having restoring our service with us every time he's at the house.

Finally, about 7pm, he shows up and announces "You're fixed!". I pick up the phone and there's a dial tone. I tell him: "Don't leave, let me test something."

I call our landline from my mobile: Landline phone doesn't ring, I just hear ringing going unanswered on the mobile.
I call my mobile from the landline: Caller ID blocked (we don't have ours blocked).

I told him, "No, it's not fixed, it's someone else's line." He tries to tell me it is my line. I tell him that if doesn't ring my physical phone, it's not worth anything to me.

He changes his tune "Oh, it's a programming problem, I can't fix that, they'll fix it on Monday." and abruptly leaves.

My guess is that he was late for beers on a Friday night, and just blew us off.

So if I consider not fixing our phone a 100% failure, the fact that he broke someone else's phone means that he's a 200% failure.

Skipping the details of how we eventually connected, over the weekend we got to meet some nice folks, Bill and Teresa, the owners of the number that we got.* Their phone died of course the moment ours was "fixed".

A little research showed that the tech closed the ticket, so the "programming" was NOT fixed on Monday.

Bill and Teresa filed a ticket and they got their phone back yesterday, so we're back to a dead line again.

We also filed another ticket.

Now I'm sitting on my @$$ again with a 9am-7:28pm (yes, 28) window.

If I can talk the GF into VoIP, CenturyLink will be losing another customer ASAP.

O2

*I've been meaning to catch up with some old friends in New Zealand for some time, glad I got a chance to. I'm kidding.

[ray1970]

I don?t mean to be rude, but people still have land lines?







(Fine. Technically I do have a land line. Just hasn?t been a working phone hooked to it in about twelve years.)

[Martinjmpr]

I don?t mean to be rude, but people still have land lines?







(Fine. Technically I do have a land line. Just hasn?t been a working phone hooked to it in about twelve years.)

We finally ditched ours in 2018 but that was the wife's old number and line.

I haven't had a land line in my name since 2002.

[O2HeN2]

I don?t mean to be rude, but people still have land lines?.

I won't take it personally. I don't want it, GF wants it for two reasons:

1) 911 knows where you are if you call and can't communicate.
2) Works during a power failure.

I hope to woo her over to VoIP with the promise of a VoIP that knows her address and a UPS with the modem, router and VoIP box plugged into it - at least it'll work for awhile.

O2

[Martinjmpr]

We just moved my mom from her townhouse to an "independent living" seniors apartment and getting the Century link landline and DSL (sadly they were the only option) was a total clusterf***.

Multiple appointments where they flat out didn't show up, or showed up and didn't do anything, hours spent on hold or waiting for a call back, etc. The story they (Century Link) are telling is that they are short handed and having work done by independent contractors who sometimes just flat out don't do anything, period. I would estimate the entire process took a little over two weeks from the date she moved (and she had called a couple of weeks prior to that to notify them) until she had both a working phone line and DSL.

I don't LOVE Comcasst but despite all the bitching I hear about them, they are light years ahead of Century Link in terms of customer service.

Century Link seems to have adopted the old Lily Tomlin routine of "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."

[Martinjmpr]

I won't take it personally. I don't want it, GF wants it for two reasons:

1) 911 knows where you are if you call and can't communicate.
2) Works during a power failure.

I hope to woo her over to VoIP with the promise of a VoIP that knows her address and a UPS with the modem, router and VoIP box plugged into it - at least it'll work for awhile.

O2

You know you can register your cell phone with the sheriff's dept and it will display your home address when calling 911. Just fyi.

[hurley842002]

I must be one of the few that have actually had good luck with Century Link (knock on wood). We had it in Colorado after getting tired of paying Comcast prices, and it worked just fine for us. Here in Arizona, the only choices where I'm at are Cox and CL, we chose to just transfer our service, and other than one outage we've had great luck, even getting service set up during Covid was simple, and the tech was great. We subscribe to a mid tier speed, and run multiple televisions streaming, along with tablets and whatever else, with zero issues. That being said (little side bit), I just picked up a cell phone plan with First Net (at&t), and my speeds are insane (212 mbps), which is much faster than my home internet.