FCC opened a case against CenturyLink

Century link replaced our line at no cost to me. The run was dead end over 1/3rd mile through a marshy field. But that was some 20+ years ago.

Here in Wisconsin, Centurylink is responsible for line maintenance up to the service box in the side of the house. Anything past that is my responsibility with the exception of the DSL modem. The modem is leased and we pay a monthly fee for its use.

When I call to report an outage, they insist it is my equipment that is defective. I go though a complete test of our equipment prior to calling them. For phone service, I can disconnect our lines and plug a phone directly into their service box. I also check with neighbors to see if they are experiencing an outage. 99.99% of the time, the problem is on their end; either in the equipment of at the termination of the fiber optic line a mile away. Once I get an actual service guy out, they are cooperative.

The neighbors are all going over to Starlink. I missed out on getting in when they were still doing beta resting
 
I guess I'm really lucky. I can't imagine what it would be like to have the problems some of you have been dealing with.

I live in a rural area and when I bought this place about 15 years ago there was no wired internet of any kind available, not even DSL. I needed the best system I could get for my customer support activities. I installed a rather expensive commercial satellite system, about $2500 for the hardware, and about $200/month for a whopping 3Mb connection, which was iffy at best. I lived with that until they ran cable in the area.

I now have Wave Broadband cable internet. 100Mb to my desktop. About 99.99% up time, with no noticeable slow downs. The system is somewhat new in our area, all of the infrastructure installed new in the last 10 or 12 years so it's in pretty good shape. In the last couple of years another company has installed fiber in the area, and there is a drop at the road in front of my property. I don't think that system is live yet, but should be soon. Looking forward to having a Gigabit connection when it's available. I guess you could say I'm a heavy internet user with about 20 some connected devices.

Now if I could just get a cell phone signal out here..... But that is another story. :rolleyes:
 
I know my Comcast and Spectrum cable modems had signal strength parameters visible on the diagnostics webpage. I'm sure the company can see those through SNMP also, so they can tell if there is a signal problem. It is easier for them to connect you to a first level service technician whose menu looks like: 1) reboot your computer. 2) power cycle the modem 3) See step one.

Early in the 1990's, when Internet connectivity was still in it's young days, I had an ISDN line between home and the office as part of some experimental testing we where doing. I managed to find out which test box the (then) BellSouth technicians used for ISDN, and had our group buy one for me. First time a tech came out and I showed him the tester already hooked up, he just gave me the phone number to their third level support tier, the folks at BellSouth who had the ability to reset their side and change parameters. ISDN had a lot of configuration options on the telco side and they would occasionally get reset so this was usually an easy fix once elevated to the right folks. Miss those days ...
 
JimDawson said:
I guess I'm really lucky. I can't imagine what it would be like to have the problems some of you have been dealing with.
Now if I could just get a cell phone signal out here..... But that is another story. :rolleyes:
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I have Verizon, and am in a signal shadow down in a canyon. I also live in an all-metal building. To get cell service, I bought an interface (Samsung Network Extender) that takes the cell signal and sends it over the internet (it is wired into our Ethernet and DSL lines) to make the cell phones work. As long as we have power and internet service, the phones work. During a power outage, we lose cell service. When we had the big ice storm last year, even the Centurylink wired phone lines went dead.

I'm quite satisfied with the Network Extender.
 
Provincial said:
I have Verizon, and am in a signal shadow down in a canyon. I also live in an all-metal building. To get cell service, I bought an interface (Samsung Network Extender) that takes the cell signal and sends it over the internet (it is wired into our Ethernet and DSL lines) to make the cell phones work. As long as we have power and internet service, the phones work. During a power outage, we lose cell service. When we had the big ice storm last year, even the Centurylink wired phone lines went dead.

I'm quite satisfied with the Network Extender.
Click to expand...

Yes, that is what I have here also.
 
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