The line from the street comes directly into the house via a single pair of 
CAT5 terminated with a RJ-11 jack.  There is not extra wiring.  DSL circuit is 
not experiencing any dropped packets or signal issues.  The issue is speed 
which is inconsistent but never reaches 20/5 service.  The best I have received 
is 18.1Mbits down which, with overhead, is pretty close.   My upload speed is 
clearly capped at 800kbps as that is consistently the maximum speed up.  Today 
on the phone they said that is the speed promised.  I can’t find any upload 
speed in anything that I signed or on any of the advertising.   800kbps is 
really slow, and not really acceptable.

 

But the biggest evidence is that the speed I get is completely time dependent.  
If I run tests after 6pm until 11pm the speed is around 2 – 4 mbps!  If I run 
it around 4am then I get around 16mbps.  So my belief is that they have 
oversold my local DSLAM and that there is not enough capacity from the DSLAM to 
the Internet.

 

They are sending me a new “modem” to see if that fixes the issue despite my 
explaining that the problem is not my connection to the local DSLAM but the 
speed from there out to the net.

 

Sova

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brandon
Sent: Friday, January 9, 2015 10:50 PM
To: A discussion list for dorkbot-pdx (portland, or)
Subject: Re: [dorkbotpdx-blabber] CenturyLink "Fiber in your neighborhood" 
Experience

 

If you're not hitting your advertised speeds I recommend doing an audit of your 
home telephone wiring. I went to my block and removed every wire except for the 
one that lead to the single jack feeding the modem (about 15ft away) and 
haven't had a lapse in speed since the day it was installed (with sporadic 
checking). 

We're in Milwaukie, so a bit further south. Pretty happy with the service and 
especially the price. We had the 20/5 service but when we called to get the 
annual 'deal' again they offered 40/5 for less than we were paying for the 20/5 
before. Sprung for that, come within 5% of the advertised speed. 

I'm sure your mileage may vary, but I'm a pretty satisfied customer.

 

I did note that their equipment (pole or ground mounted) is not UPS backed 
(they don't offer VOIP phone service in our area) so when the neighborhood 
power goes out, the internet drops too (even with my UPS backed equipment). 

Cheers!




Brandon Mathis
KD7INF
[email protected]

 

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 10:35 PM, Sova <[email protected]> wrote:

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.
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