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Brightspeed... Not so Bright

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Garth Bock:
Anyone here a former CenturyLink customer? The phone/internet service has been taken over by Brightspeed located in Charlotte NC. I have DSL out here in the country. Every few years the line quality would deteriorate and CenturyLink would have to come out and switch some of us here in our HOA to new circuits. They were easy to work with. Well, the Thurs before Thanksgiving my modem started losing the DSL signal about 5 times a day. I encountered nothing but hostility  and blame from their tech support who spoke poor English and his phone kept cutting out. I was told I was exceeding my bandwidth and I had too many wireless devices connected. I kept asking what that had to do with a modem that would lose the DSL signal and they kept changing the subject. After a week of dealing with the numerous outages each day I finally convinced them there was a line problem when the line went dead. A lineman came out and after 4 hours of line work the modem came back on line. It was a bad phone line once again. I had to call tech support to re-enable/re-register the modem and when he was done he launched into a tirade berating me for exceeding my bandwidth and having too many wireless devices connected. I let him finish and when he stopped and asked if there was anything else he could do I said No you've done enough. What that idiot didn't know is that I disabled wireless on their modem long ago and all it does is feed a DLINK multi band router. As for bandwidth usage I checked online and I am no where near any maximum (there is no cap/month). So if you are on Brightspeed be ready to fight to get service when you call support in Mexico and get told it's your fault your modem is out. I am going to fire off a letter to their corporate and ask for at least a free month for the abuse. What sucks is that last year CenturyLink buried fiber out front with the promise of connecting us. Probably never happen now.

ValentineWeather:
I've heard some good things about Starlink coming from the new SpaceX satellites you may want to look into. Doesn't look like the low-orbit satellites cover your area yet but it's coming and you can still sign up and wait.
Elon Musk is continually sending up new satellites and eventually will have the world covered. Was hoping for the end of this year 2022 to have full coverage. The advantage is the low latency over the traditional satellite services. Test show 25 to 50 ms pings while high orbit satellites are around 600 ms or 1/2 second.

The waiting list is huge I read. The cost really isn't that bad $110 per month but the $599 equipment fee may be too steep for some.
I feel fortunate we have fiber internet 500 or 1000 Mbps up and down where I'm at. The 500 runs just $60 a month. 

 https://www.starlink.com/

ocala:
That's horrible Garth.
I guess they are the only game in town so they can do what they want.
Hopefully what Randy said about Starlink happens soon. Then you'll probably see these crappy companies start falling like dominos.
I feel lucky to have Comcast. I don't really need 800Mbps of speed with just me and the wife but that's what they provide. Did get a notice that they are raising the bill in January. Will probably drop them and wait a month for the Please Come Back mailer to arrive and see if we can lower the bill. $152 a month is already to expensive for TV/Internet.
Good luck but something tells me your complaints will fall on deaf ears.

Garth Bock:
Finally tracked down a number for the regional office. The manager I spoke to was extremely tech knowledgeable. He saw the issue was a bad phone line and looked up some of the transcripts from support. He said they don't lecture anyone on bandwidth usage or too many connected devices. He was surprised that support tried to sell an upgrade instead of troubleshooting and the insistence of putting my PC in safe mode with networking to run speed tests was totally wrong. He said they have no caps on usage and apologized for the treatment I received. I was given a credit on the bill. I told him that CenturyLink had laid fiber down our road and maybe it would be good to move us over to it due to the constantly failing phone line (I'll go first! )

ValentineWeather:
I was on DSL with Centurylink before Allo Fiber came in. If fiber is a choice I wouldn't even hesitate. My fiber internet service has never gone down and going on 2-years now.  Started out with the full package TV/internet combined but prefer YouTubeTV using Roku boxes not only cheaper but less tax and surcharges which almost doubles the cost, also prefer YTTV programming options, and DVR capability so dropped the TV side. 

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