Author Topic: Brightspeed... Not so Bright  (Read 1150 times)

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Offline Garth Bock

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Brightspeed... Not so Bright
« on: November 30, 2022, 10:51:24 PM »
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.

Offline ValentineWeather

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Re: Brightspeed... Not so Bright
« Reply #1 on: December 01, 2022, 02:04:30 AM »
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/
« Last Edit: December 01, 2022, 02:10:20 AM by ValentineWeather »
Randy

Offline ocala

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Re: Brightspeed... Not so Bright
« Reply #2 on: December 01, 2022, 04:11:32 PM »
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.
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Offline Garth Bock

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Re: Brightspeed... Not so Bright
« Reply #3 on: December 03, 2022, 12:18:22 PM »
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! )

Offline ValentineWeather

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Re: Brightspeed... Not so Bright
« Reply #4 on: December 03, 2022, 12:40:54 PM »
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. 
Randy

Offline chief-david

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Re: Brightspeed... Not so Bright
« Reply #5 on: December 03, 2022, 12:58:01 PM »
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.

not many ever say they are lucky to have comcast.

But no one is a fan of their utilities.



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It's not you-It's WU.

Offline Garth Bock

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Re: Brightspeed... Not so Bright
« Reply #6 on: December 03, 2022, 02:01:04 PM »
I was under Comcast back home before I moved. Never a problem and when there was they were pretty good at fixing it. That is until about 15 years ago when servicemen would say no one was home when they were never even there. Xfinity merger took care of that. But now Metronet Fiber is taking customers from them with cheaper rates and higher bandwidths.

Don't miss Illinois's high taxes and releasing criminals with no cash bail but miss Comcast and the possibility of fiber. So 11mb/s is going to have to do but Missouri taxes are far cheaper.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2022, 02:06:37 PM by Garth Bock »

Offline Garth Bock

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Re: Brightspeed... Not so Bright
« Reply #7 on: December 05, 2022, 07:00:37 PM »
Now have a new problem... over 80% of the streaming free channels on my Vizio Smart Tv say Currently Unavailable. Got on Visio Support and they at first they suspected it was a problem with Brightspeed. So we did several resets of the modem and the TV. Didn't change anything. So I turned on tethering on my Straight Talk phone, connected the TV to it and got the same thing of some channels unavailable. So I took time and went through every channel (including the ones I can't imagine anyone ever watching) and the main thing is almost every dead channel was from Pluto TV Watch Free service. Got on with Visio again and a different tech said that there might be a problem with the Pluto TV server. Ain't that great ? So Smart Streaming TVs can turn dumb if their provider gets messed up. Well at least the apps are all working (Tubi, Fawesome, Crackle, Vudu, and others). So I don't have to suffer and watch The Life of Penguins or something like that.. I am putting on Tubi and watching The Colour of Magic again.

Offline Garth Bock

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Re: Brightspeed... Not so Bright
« Reply #8 on: December 09, 2022, 07:22:34 AM »
I have spent the past week off and on talking to Visio support about my 8 y/o E65 series and it's channel unavailable problem that affects about half the TV. Multiple resets later and testing and they are saying they would have to send a serviceman out at my expense. Then it dawned on me. I have 2 of the exact same model. One gets used and one doesn't. Both have the same problem. It's not my ISP because they both do it when tethered to my cellphone/hotspot. The problem happened right around Thanksgiving and Black Friday. There was a firmware update right at that time. The complaints are starting to appear on the web about a sudden problems with older Visio TVs recently. See where I am heading? They caused this and when I have asked about firmware they have constantly said that my TVs were at the most recent version.. but they never offered to roll mine back to see if that was the problem. I have also read claims that Visio has a pattern of partially bricking old TVs right before big sales. I dunno... I might be wrong but everything points to them. Sad thing is they don't have to fix an out of warranty TV even though it looks like it's their fault.
« Last Edit: December 09, 2022, 07:24:12 AM by Garth Bock »

Offline ocala

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Re: Brightspeed... Not so Bright
« Reply #9 on: December 09, 2022, 05:43:14 PM »
Try a Roku stick or and Amazon Fire stick.
The Fire sticks you can jailbreak and download programs to watch just about what ever you want.
The blues had a baby and they named it Rock & Roll

Offline Garth Bock

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Re: Brightspeed... Not so Bright
« Reply #10 on: December 09, 2022, 09:08:42 PM »
Had the last conversation with Visio today. They continued to deny it was a firmware update even though it happened to two identical sets here in my house. They tried to convince me it is hardware. Kept side stepping that it happened to two TVs here. Talk on the net is that Visio is becoming known for screwing up older out of warranty sets via updates. Even though the evidence points to a bad update they won't budge... total deniability...like the Whitehouse 😄.
The Watch Free Plus side is set up like cable tv with channel numbers and categories and is easy to scroll through. That is the part that is screwed up. The app side still works but to get to what I used to watch I have to go to each individual app. Thought of getting a Roku or a Google Chromecast to try and get the function back.

 

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