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Your description fits my experience in too many cases. FUBAR and some people are working for a kinder gentler world. What a farce.
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FCC opened a case against CenturyLink
- Thread starter MikeInOr
- Start date
Your description fits my experience in too many cases. FUBAR and some people are working for a kinder gentler world. What a farce.
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I suffered with HughesNet for 11 years and finally got Starlink last August. It's a real game changer for those of us out in the sticks. 99+% reliable, and it just works. Yes, it's pricey, but to me at least, worth it. Quite a few closed cells lately, so you may have to wait a while. Dropped Directv like a hot potato, and can stream anything we want now.
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OK, I'll be honest, I wanted the FCC to stick it to CenturyLink for me BEFORE I told everyone else how easy it is to file a complaint:
Filing an Informal Complaint
The Federal Communications Commission gives consumers the opportunity to file informal complaints about problems with the communications services that the FCC regulates.
I gave very specific details of the problems I have had for the last two weeks even though the problem has been going on a lot longer than that. I was only able to include a couple names of operators I talked to but was able to look at my phone log an include very specific times about when I made the appointments that they blew off.
Growing pains: CenturyLink consumer complaints spike as service expands
CenturyLink's growing quickly, but so are complaints about price spikes, billing and poor customer service.
www.kgw.com
I also filed a complaint with the Attorney General for the state of Oregon. I have not heard back from them yet. I am no expert but from what I read I get the impression that the state Attorney General is the proper place to file complaints for billing matters and the FCC is more appropriate for service issues.
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I am familiar with the Oregon PUC but have never tried to deal with them. If I had thought of it I would have filed a complaint there too along with the FCC and Oregon Attorney general. I figure the more I yell the more chance I have of actually being heard... hopefully.... eventually!
I also PM'd Centrylink via there Facebook account with out a lot of response but it is worth a try:
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I am no expert but my understanding is that HughesNet has high earth orbit satellites where Starlink has low earth orbit satellites. My understanding is the problem with HughesNet is not their bandwidth but the latency (it just takes longer for RF waves to travel to and back from the satellites that are considerably farther away from the earth). It is my understanding that the latency is the reason VPN connections do not work over HughesNet. I have looked into Starlink some but was pretty leery because of co-workers that had tried to use HugesNet in the past. I am very close to seriously looking at giving Starlink a try... hopefully it will not come to that!
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I remember calling the cable co. asking to get internet , they kept saying we’re working on getting it in our area . After months of calling and asking with them the same response I happened to mention to the next door neighbor and asked if they ever called for cable internet, she said yea we have it for almost a year ! I called again and they STILLED told me they don’t have it in our area . I told the person that the neighbor has it and we use the same pole ! Silence, we had it next week lol
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@MikeInOr
I had problems with centurylink link here in Redmond as well. My internet had always been spotty with almost daily nuisance drops and finally one day just stopped working, so I gave them a call. They told me that if a tech has to enter my home at all it'll be a $90 charge. Meaning I get to pay them for their tech to inspect the modem that they own. Of course, I would have to be available all day waiting for their tech, AND they wouldn't be able to get a tech out for 3 weeks! I told them that I naturally don't expect to be billed for time that their internet wasn't working and the phone agent told me that they couldn't do that. So, I requested a service termination and was told there would be a $140 fee to buyout my contract with them. Telling them that there couldn't be a service termination fee when there's NO SERVICE didn't seem to do much. I paid the fee to those oxygen thieves and switched to the other big internet provider here in Central Oregon. My internet had been spotless ever since. My parents use YellowKnife as they are rural and have had fairly decent luck with them.
Nick
I had problems with centurylink link here in Redmond as well. My internet had always been spotty with almost daily nuisance drops and finally one day just stopped working, so I gave them a call. They told me that if a tech has to enter my home at all it'll be a $90 charge. Meaning I get to pay them for their tech to inspect the modem that they own. Of course, I would have to be available all day waiting for their tech, AND they wouldn't be able to get a tech out for 3 weeks! I told them that I naturally don't expect to be billed for time that their internet wasn't working and the phone agent told me that they couldn't do that. So, I requested a service termination and was told there would be a $140 fee to buyout my contract with them. Telling them that there couldn't be a service termination fee when there's NO SERVICE didn't seem to do much. I paid the fee to those oxygen thieves and switched to the other big internet provider here in Central Oregon. My internet had been spotless ever since. My parents use YellowKnife as they are rural and have had fairly decent luck with them.
Nick
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I got Starlink in late February. Sort of. The new dish they have built does not include an ethernet connection, it is WiFi only. We have actual, old fashion desktop computers (by preference) and a wired network. To get a wired network, Starlink requires you to buy a $20 adapter, and then you need your own home router. The $20 adapter has been on back order, supposeably shipping this week. So I've had to continue to pay for HughesNet. I have been using the Starlink for wireless devices. It needs a broad field of view as it tracks satellites as they pass (a major reason for the expense). I'm going to mount the dish on a 25' high pole as soon as the adapter arrives, as we have a lot of trees in the yard. Then fiber between buildings and a couple of VLAN capable switches, and I'll be set. Hopefully.
Monthly cost has been raised (just recently) to I believe $115.
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HughesNet latency is a big issue, true. The round trip time (called RTT in internet speak) also plays a significant factor in non-streaming Internet traffic. Technically it effects TCP, but not UDP traffic. TCP uses the RTT to determine the retransmission on lost packets. Lost packets are just part of Internet traffic, so retransmission of a data packet happens frequently. Because of the long RTT, TCP detection of lost packets takes a long time to occur. This creates a lot of stuttering in the data stream. So while the one-way bandwidth may be high, the effective TCP bandwidth suffers.
That latency is high enough to make videoconferencing challenging.
HughesNet also caps your data to something like 30GB, (you can pay a larger monthly service and get up to 50GB). They just changed the numbers but that is the general ballpark. After you exceed that data, they throttle you to something hideously slow. It doesn't take too many hours of streaming HD video to eat up 30GB. They also only have a few satellites, so Internet capacity is shared across a huge number of users. So on busy times, the bandwidth suffers even if you're not data capped.
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I am WELL aware of those tactics CenturyLink uses. The demark is the point at which their responsibility for the line ends and my responsibility for inside wiring starts, basically the box on the side of the house where their line from the pole terminates. Years ago I ran a cat 5 cable down to that point. When ever I start having internet connectivity issues I move my modem to a garage window directly above the demark and plug it directly into the demark with the patch cable they supplied with the modem then use the cat 5 cable as an ethernet cable too connect to my house network. This way the inside wiring for the house is completely irrelevant; their modem, there patch cable plugged into their box on the side of my house. This is all due to similar bs charges similar to what you experienced. This has really taken a good portion of the wind out of their sails and they have stopped trying to hit me up with those charges.