CenturyLink left users with no service for two months, then billed them $239 | Hacker News Reader

CenturyLink left users with no service for two months, then billed them $239

arstechnica.com

85 pointsthehoff20 comments

Centurylink, like most legacy bell LEC providers are simply bureaucratic more than they are technical or support driven, and certainly this happens at them. It's why when these happen, they are almost comically absurd as no one even knows what to do usually, or silo'd to the point they can do nothing to cut red tape.

A few months ago, my Centrylink DSL router started rebooting every night at right around 3am, like at 3:06, 3:26, etc, but not before or after 3 and 3:30am, far too regular for it to be a real outage. Being a network engineer by trade (and having worked for several cable isp's), this told me provisioning was doing something, but why out of nowhere?

Calling CL twice and talking to clueless monkeys got me nowhere or hung-up on getting transferred around, until finally randomly I got a competent support human that listened to my logic, agreed it was probably a provisioning thing, and dug until he found out it truly was a provisioning thing, that my modem somehow was missing some attributes that was causing it to be reprovisioned nightly (at 3am when those jobs kick off, go figure).

Most would probably assume it's a "bad connection" or something, and at 3am when asleep probably not even notice in perpetuity, but this is the sort of thing you have to expect when dealing with a telco/lec provider. Being my job and hobby, I run a network monitoring at my house that would alert me to such things with timestamps as proof, but how many else would notice to correlate events themselves?

This is one reason why I spend considerably more money on a mere 40MBit DSL link to my preferred ISP rather than (since I live in a city where it's available) getting a fairly cheap gigabit link.

The ISP is basically somebody's personal mission, grown into a modestly successful business, specifically this guy: https://revk.uk/

I have only called them like twice since buying this place years ago, once to order a more modern DSL router, and once because my service died (electricity cable under a road literally exploded, turns out the nearby cabinet full of DSL hardware didn't like that). Each time I talked to somebody like a colleague, who understands different things than me but doesn't treat me like an idiot and expects the same in return.

We would both understand why "There's no place like ::1" is funny, and both know that "It's always DNS" is both true more often than you expect, and yet not so reliably true as to rule out all the other possible causes. When I called for the exploded DSL, they didn't waste my time asking me to try power cycling things, they were able to trace the actual problem, and quickly found out what I cared about and while I was disappointed [no Internet!] I understood what was happening and why, success.

The other reason I'm with them is that they don't do censorship. Lots of UK ISPs have "optional" censorship (you know to protect the precious children) and then of course a judge says well, you've got the technology so if I order you to take down this web site a US corporation says is infringing, that's fine. My ISP doesn't have such technology, so the judges are like -shrug- I don't see any US corporations paying to buy you all the filtering tech you'd need to implement what they want, so seems to me you have no obligations to them, carry on.

As a fellow customer, I can vouch for their gigabit service being quite nice, though :)

I’ve used a few different ISPs but I’ve gone back to A&A every time

Having worked in telephone construction (including on a Centurylink contract), your next step after customer service fails should be your state's public utility commission. PUC complaints light fires under asses. Dead phone lines were not tolerated for us (due to, obviously, customers can't call for help if something happens), and you don't need a bonafide copper splicer to make a temporary repair to get customers back in service.

A rural friend of mine just had CenturyLink buy his local broadband provider and end his service after 15 years. The infrastructure is in place and working, but the lines will go dead this month. The CS reps he spoke with were all obviously coached on the language to use when talking with him. I've given my friend FCC and state rep contact info, but as of right now his only option is starlink.

That is an big no-no with the FCC and I second your recommendation.

If you're lucky, the FCC might send CenturyLink a strongly-worded letter. That's how it went when over 200+ landlines went out in my neighborhood for over two months. My neighbors got $80 taken off their bills though.

The difference is that they are turning OFF service, not just screwing up their network with stuff that is in theory, still in operation.

CenturyLink also had a recent outage that caused 911 calls to stop working for Las Vegas, the state of South Dakota, and other areas. They blamed it on a third party light pole installation but it's being investigated.

Seems insane to me that a single line being severed could bring down 911.

A lot of smart people discover their fully redundant architecture has a single point of failure during an outage.

AWS has had a fair number of large profile outages and service degradation, including a few that crossed zones, even though that "can't happen".

Redundancy is a cost. Why pay the cost when your customers can't leave?

I don’t understand how a utility loses this much money:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/LUMN/lumen-technol...

What a terribly run business.

I wish I were authorized to talk about our metro area's CenturyLink experiences during and after the 2024 winter storm. This article is probably the best story CenturyLink could have hoped for.

If you are doing business with CenturyLink (dba Lumen), migrate away from them as soon as feasible.

PS: While you're doing business with them, check your billing closely every month or two, especially if you're a large corporate customer.

Sadly that's not always an option, thanks to tools like Ajit Pai and telecomms owning the FCC normally through lobbyists. Centurylink might be all you have as an option in places, or some other worse incumbent ISP.

Lately we've gotten gains with fighting back to overturn municipal isp limitations all the telco's lobby against to protect their monopolies/duopolies, and private companies attempting to compete with the incumbents in each market for some actual choice. Problem is small isp's that get too big in a telco territory are usually just acquired so as not to give the public any option, lest they get used to such freedoms.

In my area, my options are Centurylink DSL or Cox Communications. I used Cox and never would have dreamed about moving to DSL, then they (finally) implemented bandwidth caps, and within a month began getting overage charges. Centurylink has no bandwidth caps, and at the time was almost as fast as cable, for almost half the price, so why not. Cox also has a nasty habit of outright acquiring any competitive ISP's around or inside their local markets, taking away that choice consumers might have enjoyed.

I really haven't looked back either, though now with them offering 1-2gbps services on cable and stuck perpetually at 140mbps on DSL, I would consider going back to Cox, but not with their bandwidth caps. I'll deal with Centurylink with no caps and slower service, as even moving to gigabit services with Cox, I'd just hit my caps and have more overage charges even faster.

At least around here (Oregon) post-2024 winter storm, people with CenturyLink as the only option are fleeing to Starlink.

Unsure if that's much better, given their CEO, data caps, and high cost, but people seem pleased.

There are lots of places that only have CenturyLink, unfortunately.

Lumen is a dead company walking.

Level3's autocratic-yet-incompetent philosophy as espoused by their garbage-tier middle mangement, took over after Jeff Storey became CEO and it's been downhill ever since.

You can see a lot of parallels between the Level3/CenturyLink merger and the McDonnell Douglas/Boeing merger.

They're pretty horrible.

I signed up with them and didn't get actual service for a month because the first tech didn't do anything (as confirmed by the second tech) and I couldn't take time off work to let them into the apartment for them to determine why it wasn't working for a while. Still charged me full price for the first month though.

The whole thing was pretty dodgy to begin with as someone with an AT&T shirt showed up at my door trying to sign me up for "internet" and, after figuring out what they were really selling and telling them I owed CenturyLink money, said "that's not a problem" so I'm like "fuck yeah, sign me up". No clue what he did to get me service but I'm sure he got paid just like the first tech who's inaction was found out too late to reverse their payment for "service" according to the second tech.

Eventually I couldn't pay the bill and they tried to collect but apparently couldn't even prove I signed up after I innocently asked why they're trying to collect a debt that was something like eight years old. Incompetent company meets irresponsible consumer...

I wonder if the 411 and 911 calls were due to pulse dialing triggering on an intermittent connection. There are probably a few other folks of my age who remember discovering that you could dial a phone by tapping the hook at the right speed - after all, all that a rotary phone dial does is disconnect and reconnect the line at about 10Hz. If a wire was just loose enough that it was disconnecting intermittently, I would expect the pulse detector on the other end to detect a lot of 1s, a much smaller number of 4s, and very few 9s.

I second that thought. Years ago on a Nortel PBX, we had a line in the factory where I work that had a fault. It would intermittently dial my extension (411) and I figured that it was from pulse dialing. Eventually the fault in the line was fixed and, along with that, the 'phantom' calls I received from that extension. Interesting coincidence that in both cases the number dialed was 411. I guess I'm lucky our phone didn't dial 911!

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