CenturyLink left 86-year-old woman with no Internet service for a month
After three canceled appointments, service restored one day after Ars emailed ISP.
I love the stock image of an ethernet cable with only phone capabilities having continuity. Good choice from whoever made that decision.
Don't you need 2 pairs for phone
For a 2-line connection yes, but single line is just 1 pair.
Phone lines usually have 4 leads. Only blue/blue-white are used for the actual connection, orange/orange-white are often not connected.
I have been saying for a while now (10 years+) that internet should be treated like gas, electricity and water. Today its an essential service.
However, at least in OZ, ISPs are not accountable for outages, and should be.
Here, if electricity is out for a certain period, you can claim for spoilage and if its longer than a govt set period, the electricity company must pay you.
same for the other services (but rarely happens).
ISPs should be considered an essential service, and if they are out for 4hrs, then it should start costing by paying the customer.
And possibly there should be clauses for outages that have "catastrophic outcomes" (im not gonna define it, but you get the idea) should result in suitable claims for damages.
As a former customer this doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
Our neighborhood and its twisted pair is 50 years old. I had DSL from the moment it first became available, and over time they upgraded the speeds. I have been WFH since 2006.
During that time I had had multiple cases of DSL going down and in many cases a new modem cured it.
But suddenly, during the Pandemic, the modem started losing its link 1-5 times a day every day. Totally unacceptable. I called multiple times. They came out multiple times. They weren't able to find a problem on their end even after multiple visits and we had eliminated the problem being on my end.
It's like nobody had any ownership of the issue or any sense of duty to proactively troubleshoot the problem to resolution. They almost treated every call as an isolated momentary issue despite having the prior info and me relaying it. They would just come out, do a line test, and when everything looked ok, they would shrug and leave. And the problems would continue as before.
Perhaps it was an intermittent hardware fault in the CO. Perhaps it was just old copper they were unwilling to spend any money on upgrading. I found I wasn't alone. A few others had the same issue in the neighborhood too.
I'm on brand new fiber now with a different provider and reliability is orders of magnitude better as one might expect.
But yeah, fuck CenturyLink.
Sounds identical to my experience. In a former qwest service area.
I've been in the communications industry for almost 30 years & I don't think I've ever heard anything good about CenturyLink.
A company finally engaging in something resembling customer service or doing their fucking job after being contacted by journalists threatening to expose their behavior? That's never happened before and certainly won't happen again. /s
My hatred for CenturyLink is only 2nd to what Suddenlink put my family through. It took an FCC complaint against Suddenlink for them to come fix our phone lines/Internet/security system that were all down for a full month before they actually came to fix it. They had to actually reply to the FCC complaint within 10 days.
I only made that complaint after a Suddenlink worker said that there wasn't an outage like we had thought for the last 3 weeks. They then said the automated message that stated "your location has an outage" was fake and just what they were using to stop people from calling.
We worked from home and had to rely on mobile hotspots. Was all during covid so it was even harder for going out to have a safe place to work.
the ILEC not giving a sh;it about a reseller's customer on their network? surprise surprise.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Helen Marie Plourde, an 86-year-old Minnesota resident, just spent over a month without home Internet and phone service because CenturyLink failed to fix a problem that began in July.
Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis, put Deloney in touch with us.
"For the past month, [Plourde] has been going to my mom and dad's house to use the Internet two times a day because hers went out and CenturyLink can't be bothered fixing it.
That didn't end up being necessary because CenturyLink sprang into action after Ars contacted the company's media relations team on Thursday night.
A CenturyLink technician went to Plourde's home on Friday morning and fixed a line problem on a nearby street, restoring her Internet and VoIP phone service.
On Friday morning, CenturyLink told Ars that "the help ticket did not escalate through Velocity's process properly, so it wasn't in our system."
The original article contains 510 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Note to self, never use a reseller. Ever.
Not being funny but this is hardly criminal, what would a 86 year old do without Internet?
Unless something is life threatening, we've had towns without Internet for a month due to contractor cutting the fibre.
However, iirc the article stated this affected her phone service too. If it hadn’t been for her cell phone she could have been in jeopardy if something happened and she couldn’t call out.
That does make it an issue in which it could be declared as criminal endangerment of the elderly. This in turn would cost them a lot more than a techs pay.
Ah that makes sense, I blame late night reading 📚
