Thought I would just let everyone know that (as expected), CenturyLink's advertising of "Fiber in your neighborhood" appears to be nothing but marketing lies. The first lie was that it wasn't fiber to the door actually fiber to the node VDSL service. They then told me I could order 40mbps DSL, which I did, but then later my order was changed to 20mbps because they said higher speeds were not available in my area.
They do actually have some fiber to the house installs happening in Portland now. They just aren't in the areas that the people knocking on doors are canvasing. My guess is they are trying to figure out how much interest there is in a neighborhood and if they should extend the fiber service further into the area. Anyway, the only areas I know are actually being installed with fiber to the door is along SE 26th Ave from Belmont to Powell, and between SE Belmont and SE Hawthorne from SE26th up to SE33rd (approx.). Today during the install I was told I was too far from the node and could only get 20mbps (which they had already told me, but apparently not the technician). Then the second issue was that the modem they provided me wasn't able to do a transparent bridged connection. Luckily Tech had a different one on the truck. He gave it to me and then took off. I switched it over to bridge but then nothing worked. Figured out that you have to have authenticated PPPoE for DHCP and then spent a few hours on the phone trying to get my authentication credentials, which were never provided to me. Anyway, it is all installed but I have yet to see anything close to the speed promised. Best I have gotten is 10mbps down, 0.8mpbs up. This evening I have been having about 2.0mpbs down and 0.5mbps up. Their provided DNS servers are incredibly slow, but switching to my own recursive DNS server didn't help much. Tried forever to find the promised upload speed and can't find it listed anywhere not even in the very hard to find legal print. A good thing to note is that in the legal print the speeds promised are stated as "between your home and our offices" so you aren't even getting promised Internet speeds. Maybe you won't care that you have 40mbps to their offices and then you have 2.0mbps out to the Internet, but I'm not very happy with that deal. So... Comcast still remains the only real high-speed option in SE Portland (all of Portland proper?) and I don't recommend wasting your time with CenturyLink. If anyone has a recommendation for a fixed wireless service with decent speeds, please let me know. I'm tired of giving money to Comcast or CenturyLink for their horrible monopoly Internet options. Sova PS - When I was in the Netherlands I had three ISPs to pick from that all provided service via DOCSIS cable service. I paid 40 EUR a month for 30mbps which was plenty fast, always working, and didn't block, redirect, filter, of otherwise molest my traffic. I did have to VPN back to the US for Netflix and Pandora which was annoying, however. _______________________________________________ dorkbotpdx-blabber mailing list [email protected] http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/dorkbotpdx-blabber
