Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

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OP is using CenturyLink fiber. I don't know if things have improved in the two years since I moved from Tacoma, WA where I had it, but it was dreadfully unreliable back in 2016. The unreliability wasn't caused by the fiber drop itself but rather, by a super shitty oversubscription issue up in their Tukwilla/Seattle exchange.

Their IPv6 situation was even worse. They used 6rd and I swear, the translation box was probably a single router or Linux box with a 100 Mbit NIC in a rack somewhere. If you bothered enabling 6rd, every v6 site would be awfully slow. Even the browser projects to automate the selection of v6/v4 didn't help.

When I finally moved away and cancelled the service, I mailed my modem back as directed. A few months later, they sent my account to a collections agency over the cost of a modem, which their system claimed to have not received. I spent hours on endless phone calls but ended up just paying them the $250 or whatever to save my credit and stop the madness.

Seriously, they were the worst provider I ever had.

I have Century Link fiber in Seattle and the internet experience has been good. They do keep charging me for 2(!) modems, though--one that I mailed back and one that I never had. Every six months or so I call them up and they credit the erroneous charges back to my account and remove the modems. Invariably the modem charges show back up 1-3 months later. I'm pretty sure this is some sort of procedural dark pattern meant to rip off everyone audacious enough to bring their own modem but not routinely check their bill.

Same thing happened with me and Time Warner Cable in New York. Every six months they would mysteriously boost my rate. I would call into cancellations and they’r refund the erroneous charges, only to try again in six months. A letter to my Attorney General stopped that crap.

"I will be contacting the attorney general's office, consumer fraud division, what was your name again?" is a very powerful way to get results.

> is a very powerful way to get results

In my experience, nothing happens until you actually make contact. Legal isn’t usually pleasant. But they’re almost always competent.

You threatened a lawsuit to a $8 an hour support rep. Do you think they really care? They just want you off the phone for metric reasons so they get a bigger raise.

Yep, I didnt a stint in one of samsung's global escalation centers and all the reps always rooted for people to threaten shit like this. Once you go legal there's no going back and Im no longer allowed to talk to you, only corporate counsel.

We all knew that 95% of all legal mumbo jumbo threats where all bark and no bite, and the other 10% was someone else's problem. So threaten away and know that you're making reps days.

Those ubiquitous "Turn on Auto-pay" buttons, in bright blue, are surely a hook into just such a hustle. How many people would bother to check the charges every month once they've signed up? Only the providers know for sure ...

I wish some attorney would initiate a class action over this. Attorneys file class action lawsuits over all sorts of petty charges all of the time and win. Reading these comments, this certainly feels like a pattern. The dollar amounts involved are not small, either.

The Minnesota Attorney general did: http://www.startribune.com/minnesota-attorney-general-sues-c...

That's crazy. I had the exact same experience, except for me they said the service had been cancelled, but then sent me a bill 3 months later for 3 months of back payment I "owed". And in my case I called and complained, but ended up just giving up and not paying.

They still come by to sell me fiber a few times a year, and I explain I would try again if they "forgive" the money I owe, the salesperson says "no problem", they spend 20 minutes on the phone to HQ, then say it's impossible :)

Oh yeah, and I had the exact same oversubscription issue. The service was fast as hell, until the middleschoolers got home at 2:30ish, then it slowed to almost unusable speeds.

My experience with them in Seattle has been relatively positive; no IPv6 slowness, good and consistent throughout overall. Moving inside of Seattle was mindbogglingly difficult for some reason and involved a 3 hour phone call with 10+ transfers and several layers of escalation just to confirm they serviced my new house... but once that was out of the way no issues.

When I moved between apartments in NYC, Time Warner Cable internal systems got very confused somehow. I had working internet at the new address, and was only being billed for the new address, but the old address was still under my name somehow, so the people who moved in could not get service. I was called by a TWC sales rep to ask me to call TWC support to clear this up for the new tenants. TWC support transferred me between accounts-management and network-tech multiple times, they were all confused. Took about 2 hours of active question/response. (I went through it to make sure I wouldn't get some mystery/impossible bill in the future.)

IPv6 is faster on Centurylink Fiber than IPv4, by a good 25 to 30ms (eg: local servers will be 2ms to 3ms over IPv6, or 27ms to 33ms via IPv4). This is primarily due to much more open peering policies for IPv6, they peer with Hurricane Electric in Seattle on IPv6 (but not via IPv4), HE has established itself as a critical peer for IPv6 (which benefits me greatly!).

Not sure if you'll see this, but - maybe you should see if you can find an IPv6 datacenter/hosting provider within short throw (tens to hundreds of miles) of the peering center, and VPN all your traffic!

(Hm. Bandwidth costs might throw that idea out the window, but it might be absolutely worth it for gaming - or maybe you could sign up for game server v6 alpha/beta testing, heh)

Heh, I do read most replies. To answer your question, I do VPN some latency sensitive stuff (and the free wifi I offer) to nearby servers as I have a few dozen TB of extra bandwidth included in my $30/month resource pool with 'em.

I have Century Link in Seattle. IPv6 is laggy as hell even though internet speed tests report >400Mbps. They also mysteriously doubled my service fee 10 months in. Comcast had better latency and less "billing-anomalies"

They have had persistent peering issues with YouTube, too, causing abnormally slow speeds.[1] Another tier 1 ISP making their customers suffer so they can shake down content providers for bandwidth fees.

Oh well, let's keep gifting them billions in CAF funding to build out more poorly-maintained private networks and allow more monopoly mergers with other tier 1 providers. I'm sure that'll help and not cause decades of stagnation.

[1]: https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r31539668-Awful-YouTube-Con...

Over IPv6 they have direct peering with Hurricane Electric in Seattle, which brings local latency down to 2 to 3ms. Performance for Youtube & Netflix is way better over IPv6 too, but in some edge cases I'll tunnel through a VPS in downtown to get close to filling my pipe when downloading stuff from overseas.

Reliability wise, I've had 1 outage in two years, which happened at 1am on a weekday for slightly under 2 hours due to a PPPoE Aggregator failing. Far better than Comcast or Wave ever were, and at our usage I don't think either of the cable providers would be viable. We hit 12TB last month iirc, not even a peep from Centurylink.

12TB? Is this a business or a residential service? How do you use that much data?

I'm guessing he's downloading "Linux ISOs".

Nope, that is minor portion of my traffic, nearly all of it is Sling with a bit of Netflix. Turns out high quality streaming video being left on 24/7 on multiple screens burns a ton of bandwidth :P

It seems wasteful to just leave on something streaming, just because you can.

Bandwidth is ephemeral, if you don't use it now, its not as though it will pile up and be usable later. With Fiber, there is no good reason to moderate usage, I'd be more concerned with the few watts the endpoint burns (which costs sub-$10 a year) than an extra TB of usage.

I have this on occasions. Action Cam footage which I backup to the cloud. If you use 4k it is a lot :)

That is on Residential service, mostly Sling & Netflix. When I was on Centurylink's Prism IPTV product (which is great BTW (besides pricing), best linear TV experience out there, instant channel switching and live view of the last 5 channels you watched) we would regularly use in excess of 15TB as the IPTV traffic was constant unless you turned the STB off on each TV.

Right, I mustn't have been thinking properly - that's only about 36 megabits per second sustained. If that's multicast or from a local-ish node (which IPTV probably is), it's nothing.

Well, it was UDP Multicast when we were with Centurylink's IPTV, but now all that bandwidth has to transit an IX or transit provider.

Speaking of UDP Multicast, PFSense dropped all support for it without warning before updating, which was the end of me using PFSense at home as it broke TV until I could replace it with OpenWRT.

I am not hugely familiar with how wholesale traffic works on the internet but I am a bit suprised to hear about different routing between IPv4 and IPv6. Isn’t any network hardware manufactured in the past 10 or 15 years dual stack? Surely by now we must be close to 100% IPv6 ready on the backbones. Why would there be a different route for v6 packets?

Fair enough. I've only had personal experience with CenturyLink's DSL service which in comparison to their fiber is abysmal. I'm probably letting my anger towards CenturyLink's poor stewardship of rural copper and the gov't rewarding them with free CAF money cloud my judgment.

Centurylink needs to get their worthless trash (aka copper) off the poles, the only way they'll gain and retain customers is with modern infrastructure (not ADSL like they've stranded so many areas on) and reasonable billing practices. VDSL2 is moderately competitive where its deployed, but old non-serviced areas like my part of Seattle (which never saw DSL) or poorly serviced areas on ADSL need to see upgrades immediately if Centurylink is to retain profitability on its non-carrier services side of the business.

As a primarily urban provider, CenturyLink almost certainly pays more into the CAF than it gets out of it. (CAF is money is collected from all ILECs and redistributed to rural ILECs).

I had the identical experience when they first launched and started heavily promoting their fiber to the home in seattle a year or two back. Same terrible v6 site performance, same oversubscription issues, and same "we never received the modem" claim. This claim didn't show up till about 2 months after I sent it in, by which time I no longer had my UPS tracking number. Seems like a real pattern with them and felt scammy even then.

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