CenturyLink Left 86-Year-Old Woman With No Internet Service For a Month (arstechnica.com) 38
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. From a report: CenturyLink didn't show up for scheduled appointments at her home in Saint Paul, Plourde told Ars in a phone interview on Thursday, August 24, one day after the latest missed service appointment. Another appointment was scheduled for August 28, but she was skeptical that it would actually happen. "I'll believe it when I see them," Plourde said. Plourde buys broadband through Velocity Telephone, which resells CenturyLink fiber service in her area and acts as an intermediary between customers and CenturyLink for repairs. Velocity told us that it set up CenturyLink appointments for Plourde on August 10, August 17, and August 23, but no CenturyLink technicians showed up to any of the appointments.
We talked to Plourde after hearing from Amalia Deloney, whose parents live nearby. 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. She's ready to write letters to elected officials and the Utilities Commission out of desperation," Deloney said. 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. Velocity, the CenturyLink reseller, also offers its own fiber service on infrastructure it owns in parts of Minnesota, but not where Plourde lives. Comcast is the other option at Plourde's house. She chose Velocity to support a local company.
We talked to Plourde after hearing from Amalia Deloney, whose parents live nearby. 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. She's ready to write letters to elected officials and the Utilities Commission out of desperation," Deloney said. 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. Velocity, the CenturyLink reseller, also offers its own fiber service on infrastructure it owns in parts of Minnesota, but not where Plourde lives. Comcast is the other option at Plourde's house. She chose Velocity to support a local company.
Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Informative)
Been fighting with Lumen for the better part of this year so far just trying to get a circuit turned up at a business.
They are perfectly happy to bill for the non-working service, but good luck getting them out to figure out and fix the thing that has never worked from day one.
Open tickets get automatically closed, support technicians seemingly avoid my phone calls and then call back at random times outside of business hours. Technicians claim to have been on site, find no problem and then leave without ever letting anyone know of their presence.
We joked early on that we would end up getting this service activated by Christmas.... it is looking more and more like this is going to be the reality.
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We joked early on that we would end up getting this service activated by Christmas.... it is looking more and more like this is going to be the reality.
After all that's (not) happened - I admire your ability to remain optimistic!
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Been fighting with Lumen for the better part of this year so far just trying to get a circuit turned up at a business.
They are perfectly happy to bill for the non-working service, but good luck getting them out to figure out and fix the thing that has never worked from day one.
Open tickets get automatically closed, support technicians seemingly avoid my phone calls and then call back at random times outside of business hours. Technicians claim to have been on site, find no problem and then leave without ever letting anyone know of their presence.
If they are billing for service they are not providing and have never provided, then perhaps you have legal grounds there? I'd set up a surveillance camera if you can, and perhaps catch them in a blatant lie regarding coming "onsite" to fix a problem they claim isn't. Or review existing surveillance if possible to validate previous claims of work.
I'd hope somewhere in our corrupt legal system you might have a fighting chance with that kind of evidence.
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what reason do they have to do anything if they're still getting paid?
As a former Comcast employee (Score:5, Interesting)
I Read The Summary (Score:5, Informative)
The entire event seems perfectly plausible and outright sad. A month without service is totally unacceptable.
It reminded me of trouble calls with SWBT back in the day. If a customer accessed their trouble ticket the SWBT system would automatically close the ticket. I know a customer that eventually had to open 3 tickets in the course of 1 WEEK to get their DSL issue repaired. It involved DSL where the SWBT internal groups (DSL and I&R) argued about who was supposed to fix the problem. I noticed the final solution was a DSL tech reterminating the SWBT connections inside the SWBT-secured portion of the "gray box"; broken or bad connections. That's the box that divides customer responsibility from SWBT responsibility and that secure portion of the box is definitely accessible to SWBT I&R techs. And Corporate SWBT just did not care that repairs took 5 days to complete.
When the SWBT DSL tech asked me who I was overseeing these repairs at a customer's home, I told him I worked for SWBT's rival telephone company in the region...in Technical Support no less, where we worked with our own field techs to solve customer's problems. Needless to say that SWBT tech was so horribly red-faced and he thoroughly checked EVERYTHING before he left. I guess word got around about that house in the local SWBT garage since that house never had another SWBT issue...as long as they had SWBT service.
Why? (Score:2, Troll)
Why is a basic story about as customer service important to discuss on Slashdot?
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I found it useful as I'd been considering CenturyLink as a possible choice.
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I found it useful as I'd been considering CenturyLink as a possible choice.
She's actually a customer of Velocity Telephone, which is a reseller of CenturyLink.
No way to know if the problem was at the Velocity end, as CenturyLink claims
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Re:Why? (Score:4, Funny)
Right to repair laws.
She should be able to put on some pole climbing spikes and go fix it herself.
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CenturyLink only does business via hostage-taking (Score:3)
Internet in "the Cities" (Score:2)
" Another appointment was scheduled for August 28, but she was skeptical that it would actually happen."
Well did they turn up?
August 28 has come...
(aye Caesar but not yet gone..)
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Yes, no internet.
For some moronic reason, some phone companies have decided to slave phone to internet some tech thing called voip - no internet, no phone.
No phone, no emergency services like 911/999/000/112.
Even mobile/cell services are piggy-backed on this, so outages cause a problem.
How do we know the problem is CenturyLink? (Score:4, Interesting)
How do we know the problem is CenturyLink? The article says she is a customer of Velocity Telephone and calls them for service.
They claim they have made appointments with CenturyLink, but how can you know they did?
The article says: "CenturyLink told Ars that the help ticket did not escalate through Velocity's process properly, so it wasn't in our system."
We do know when Ars contacted CenturyLink her service was repaired. So this could have been a Velocity screwup, not CenturyLink.
What's the benefit of using Velocity as an intermediary anyway?
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This was my thought as well.
It seems far more likely that Velocity is a shitty reseller, and they just straight up failed to escalate to up to CenturyLink.
As for what benefit there is in using them, a cursory look at their website shows that there really isn't one. In fact, their pricing [velocitytelephone.com] makes me think they exist solely to prey on the elderly and ill informed.
The American Dream! (Score:2)
It really is the American Dream... for the companies.
Not just CenturyLink (Score:5, Interesting)
We have CenturyLink here locally, and see similar problems.
I've seen the problem with other cable providers, as well. You'll have a situation where your modem will connect but upstream communication will be minimal/negligible. Or the SNR on the line is intermittent due to rodent-chewed wires or someone putting a bad tap on the circuit for a new TV, and it's only apparent at specific hours when the offending customer is watching things.
It's gotten to the point for me, personally, where I've got the personal number for one of the guys - if I identify there's a problem, he'll come out to our circuit and fix it. The alternative is a half dozen calls - despite my account being flagged/noted as "this guy knows what he's talking about" (it's a small community ISP in a small state) - to the ISP helpdesk and going through the entry level "Have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in again?" line of questioning.
It's a real problem, and I've personally had the line to my house replaced twice in the last 3 years (on average, about once every 3 years for the past decade) from my house to the pole due to rodent damage. They've been out easily twice for every time they've replaced my line to replace something else on our node from my calls alone. There's a lot of cost and maintenance there, presumably due to newer "ecologically friendly" wiring sheathing which is made from corn.
How many have had this happen? (Score:4, Informative)
I recorded a video from my drive way showing no one being around, and emailed it both Rogers and Start. They hold me the tech was certainly in the area, and that I must have sent them a fake video. I asked them to verify the EXIF data, to which they told me (paraphrased): "We don't do EXIF sir, you need to be at home.", I offered them one more chance and literally sat outside in camp folding chair in my drive way, and no one showed up. I had a recording running the entire time, and Rogers claimed, again, it was fake.
Once they realized the video couldn't be fake, they tried to blame me for giving them a bad address. While, my postal code was accurate, the street name was correct and the house number was correct, so that wasn't it. After another two weeks of this game, I had a Sr Manager from Rogers drive out to my house with a tech to personally verify the install, which finally happened!
Several months later I got an email from Rogers about a bug in their ticketing / reservation system, and that the problem was going to be solved shortly and not to worry. The coverage period was during the missed installs, and after I ripped their customer service agents a new one for doubting me and not being honest, they tried to blame me for not explaining the problem "properly".
The only good part of the story, we got 24 months of a $50 credit / month.
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Start might be disassociated now, I have no idea, bec
This is outrageous (Score:2)
seriously (Score:2)
This has got to be the stupidest summary i have ever read on slashdot.
Tech support scheduling delays, stuff that literally doesn't matter.
I once had no internet over christmas because no one was there to hook it up for a week. The horror! Somehow i survived. Not to mention the first like what 15 years of my life? yet somehow, i made it through.
Where's my parade?
Yet another me too (Score:2)
At the end of April I received letters and phone calls from Frontier, our POTS service incumbent, loudly proclaiming fiber was now available. It appears that this is not (yet) true for me through at least today, August 28. It seems engineering had to become involved to actually run fiber to our home. We're an island, it seems, in the middle of our nearly 200k population city, a mile walk or so to City Hall. Everybody around our property has the necessary fiber to which they can connect service. We don't. Af
Centurylink = Total scumbags (Score:1)