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.

Fuck ISPs

Maybe Ars can look into ISP's jacking rates up. Fuck you Charter. I see that extra $5 you added on my monthly statement.

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."

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CenturyLink is absolute garbage. I rented a DSL modem from them. It got fried by lightning so they had to replace it. They sent me a modem that wasn't compatible with my service. A couple years later, I had another one get zapped. I double checked with not one but two customer service reps to make sure they were sending me a modem that worked with my service. They sent me one that wasn't compatible with my service. Then they took a few weeks to send me one that actually was compatible. When it got here, it either didn't work or something else in the wiring was messed up (probably more likely).

That last part might not have been their fault but I could have known about it 3 weeks sooner. At that point I didn't have much confidence they'd get it fixed while I still have my youth and good looks. Fortunately a smaller fiber company had just started serving the area and I was able to immediate cancel the CenturyLink service. More than 3 times faster and slightly cheaper as well. Also symmetric upload is pretty nice. CenturyLink is in for a rude awakening as competition appears in places where they previously were the only choice.