Yesterday, I filed my first complaint to the FCC concerning the shoddy service I've received from CenturyLink. For more than a month, I've had to deal with an internet service over DSL that just would not maintain the service level agreement speed of at least 4mbs per second.
On May 1st, I had changed to DSL to see if we could cut our costs from Comcast. I thought that life might be bearable with a much slower service at a steep discount. I was wrong.
At first I noticed that from time to time, the Internet was slow. Then I logged into the modem to check the speed. It was never the same. it was supposed to read 5.120mbs, but often read much, much lower. Sometimes 2.Xmbs. Sometimes it was at max. Even after a reboot, it would not return to the highest speed. I started keeping a log and soon after that, I could see that this wasn't going to improve.
After many phone and email contacts and one service visit, I gave up. I set up Comcast on Sunday and that works great. But there remained the task of cancelling CenturyLink.
Yesterday, I called CenturyLink to cancel my service. I learned that I was in a two year contract that required payment of a $200 cancellation fee. This would be understandable if the service were good. But it was terrible. Worse, all their "repairs" and "inspections" were merely gestures. They know that I'm on the hook for $200 and it might be hard to prove the point to a 3rd party.
CenturyLink thinks that I should put up with months of testing, repairs, replacement modems lots of correspondence and phone calls, just to satisfy their claim that they should be afforded every opportunity to repair the hardware and make it run right. Is that what they call customer service? I'd hate to think what they would do if they went rogue.
Well, my complaint will put this to the test. Is the FCC an advocate for the consumer? We'll see. Be sure to watch my blog as I'll post my progress here.
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