Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrbill | Hacker News Reader

I've heard nothing good about CenturyLink. People I know who have them as a provider almost universally hate it.

They tend to let things linger and die rather than keeping them up or improve them.

I had Sprint as a local phone company and DSL ISP in the early to mid-2000s. The other options in this small town were cable, but with a dial-up uplink or Hughes satellite.

Sprint was a great ISP, downtime was perhaps two times over the years. CenturyLink purchased the phone and DSL from Sprint, and coasted along on Sprint's old infrastructure for a about a year then the bandwidth exhaustion set it. First it was the peak times that were unusable, then it was just about anytime day or night that latency was through the roof. Fixing it was just around the corner. When I switched to cable, it took another 2-3 years to resolve it.

Does anyone like their cable company? How do they compare to Comcast, Time-Warner, Cablevision?

One data point, but sonic.net is great. Friendly service and consistently given top marks by the EFF on privacy concerns. Also, it's reasonably cheap and you can get a static ip with your service.

Edit: I'm not affiliated in any way.

Yes, we need more regional examples like the Bay Area's sonic, with a decade-plus track record of survival and quality.

I have had both Comcast and CenturyLink for several years and I just dropped the Comcast connection and kept CenturyLink. I haven't really had any problems with them.

I've been with Cox in Tempe... the cable service, except when the technicians mistakenly disconnected me instead of another apartment (twice), or when they disconnected my business connection at my old location 4 days before the scheduled install at the new location for my new location, has been great...

The speeds are great, the uptime (excetions noted) great... They seem to have some serious logistical issues, but the internet connection itself has been good. 120mb down, around 22mb up.

I have CenturyLink in Salt Lake City. I get 60Mbps down 20mbps up for 35$ a month. My SNR is great and my line attentuation is great. I haven't had a single issue with CL. Perhaps the service is good as Google Fiber is coming.

Count me in the anecdata column against that. I have Comcast at home which disconnects 6 times per day for 5-30 minutes per session and they refuse to believe it is their fault (constant ranging response timeouts on two DOCSIS modems says otherwise) and CenturyLink at work is up 24/7 with only one restart of the modem needed in the last 12 months with consistent 30/30 bandwidth for $50/month.

CenturyLink doesn't serve my home with anything better than 6/1 service otherwise I'd use them. Thank god for regional monopolies.

I'll be happy to provide my name in the against column. I used to subscribe to an ADSL service starting about a decade ago through a local ISP, but I was required to lease the copper connection through Qwest which was acquired by CenturyLink. I could always tell when someone new moved into the neighborhood and signed up with CenturyLink because the technician would always climb up the pole and disconnect me in order to hook up their line. That's not to say that my speeds weren't great (was paying for 7/1, which is what I received), but the cost on the leased line was extraordinary. By the time I canceled the monthly bill for a dead phone line to my ISP climbed from about $25 to $60, still for 7/1 service.

I only switched to Comcast at home last year because it was 2013 and 1Mbit upload speeds for the price I was paying was ridiculous. At least with Comcast I know how to play the "the cost is too high, do you have any special offers this month?" game. They've been just as consistent, without the physical disconnects.

Maybe an outlier, but they are providing 12mbs service to my rural home in S. Oregon, and 40mbs fiber service to my apartment in Portland. Both work great and are very reliable.

They're OK in cities where they have enough competition to make them invest in infrastructure. They're effing terrible if you're somewhere there's not enough competition for them to ever invest in infrastructure. My customer service experiences with them have also been terrible - incompetent CSRs, clueless techs.

Basically like any megaprovider, they only do as much as competition forces them to.

They've been my ISP for 2 years. No problems at all. I haven't had to use support, so I can't speak to that side of things. Connection has been solid though.

They sponsor a nice stadium in Seattle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com