4 ms·

Centurylink, like most legacy bell LEC providers are simply bureaucratic more than they are technical or support driven, and certainly this happens at them. It

Centurylink, like most legacy bell LEC providers are simply bureaucratic more than they are technical or support driven, and certainly this happens at them. It's why when these happen, they are almost comically absurd as no one even knows what to do usually, or silo'd to the point they can do nothing to cut red tape. A few months ago, my Centrylink DSL router started rebooting every night at right around 3am, like at 3:06, 3:26, etc, but not before or after 3 and 3:30am, far too regular for it to be a real outage. Being a network engineer by trade (and having worked for several cable isp's), this told me provisioning was doing something, but why out of nowhere? Calling CL twice and talking to clueless monkeys got me nowhere or hung-up on getting transferred around, until finally randomly I got a competent support human that listened to my logic, agreed it was probably a provisioning thing, and dug until he found out it truly was a provisioning thing, that my modem somehow was missing some attributes that was causing it to be reprovisioned nightly (at 3am when those jobs kick off, go figure). Most would probably assume it's a "bad connection" or something, and at 3am when asleep probably not even notice in perpetuity, but this is the sort of thing you have to expect when dealing with a telco/lec provider. Being my job and hobby, I run a network monitoring at my house that would alert me to such things with timestamps as proof, but how many else would notice to correlate events themselves?

tialaramex 2y ago
This is one reason why I spend considerably more money on a mere 40MBit DSL link to my preferred ISP rather than (since I live in a city where it's available) getting a fairly cheap gigabit link. The ISP is basically somebody's personal mission, grown into a modestly successful business, specifically this guy: https://revk.uk/ https://revk.uk/ I have only called them like twice since buying this place years ago, once to order a more modern DSL router, and once because my service died (electricity cable under a road literally exploded, turns out the nearby cabinet full of DSL hardware didn't like that). Each time I talked to somebody like a colleague, who understands different things than me but doesn't treat me like an idiot and expects the same in return. We would both understand why "There's no place like ::1" is funny, and both know that "It's always DNS" is both true more often than you expect, and yet not so reliably true as to rule out all the other possible causes. When I called for the exploded DSL, they didn't waste my time asking me to try power cycling things, they were able to trace the actual problem, and quickly found out what I cared about and while I was disappointed [no Internet!] I understood what was happening and why, success. The other reason I'm with them is that they don't do censorship. Lots of UK ISPs have "optional" censorship (you know to protect the precious children) and then of course a judge says well, you've got the technology so if I order you to take down this web site a US corporation says is infringing, that's fine. My ISP doesn't have such technology, so the judges are like -shrug- I don't see any US corporations paying to buy you all the filtering tech you'd need to implement what they want, so seems to me you have no obligations to them, carry on.
- fourfour3 2y ago
  As a fellow customer, I can vouch for their gigabit service being quite nice, though :) I’ve used a few different ISPs but I’ve gone back to A&A every time

tialaramex 2y ago

This is one reason why I spend considerably more money on a mere 40MBit DSL link to my preferred ISP rather than (since I live in a city where it's available) getting a fairly cheap gigabit link. The ISP is basically somebody's personal mission, grown into a modestly successful business, specifically this guy: https://revk.uk/ https://revk.uk/ I have only called them like twice since buying this place years ago, once to order a more modern DSL router, and once because my service died (electricity cable under a road literally exploded, turns out the nearby cabinet full of DSL hardware didn't like that). Each time I talked to somebody like a colleague, who understands different things than me but doesn't treat me like an idiot and expects the same in return. We would both understand why "There's no place like ::1" is funny, and both know that "It's always DNS" is both true more often than you expect, and yet not so reliably true as to rule out all the other possible causes. When I called for the exploded DSL, they didn't waste my time asking me to try power cycling things, they were able to trace the actual problem, and quickly found out what I cared about and while I was disappointed [no Internet!] I understood what was happening and why, success. The other reason I'm with them is that they don't do censorship. Lots of UK ISPs have "optional" censorship (you know to protect the precious children) and then of course a judge says well, you've got the technology so if I order you to take down this web site a US corporation says is infringing, that's fine. My ISP doesn't have such technology, so the judges are like -shrug- I don't see any US corporations paying to buy you all the filtering tech you'd need to implement what they want, so seems to me you have no obligations to them, carry on.

fourfour3 2y ago
As a fellow customer, I can vouch for their gigabit service being quite nice, though :) I’ve used a few different ISPs but I’ve gone back to A&A every time