Thursday, July 15, 2021

Sometime after 9 PM on July 11th, I noticed that my internet had started to have issues, only giving me about half of the transfer rate I was supposed to be getting since my switch to CenturyLink (40 mbps download & 3 upload), which can be seen here:


After the call on the 11th, they said they were going to have somebody look at it, but I never got an update on this & attempted to contact them again for a followup on the 13th, to which I got 2 answers that didn't go anywhere (the first call not saying a thing after their picked up, the second call not saying anything until I started repeating "Hello?" to see if anybody was even there, they eventually asked for my name & account number, where after I gave them that information, they started claiming that they couldn't hear me speaking.

I tried again the following day (the 14th) in an attempt to get an update on what was going on, finally getting somebody who responded, it seems that a support ticket wasn't even opened on the first call I made on the 11th.  I did start messing with the cables attached to the back of my modem & did a few more power recycles to see if it was just a loose cable, I got it working again (at full speed), so I closed the work ticket & went to bed (spending more time that I should have trying to get this working & mitigating what online tasks I could get done while the connection was malfunctioning).  When I woke up however, I saw that the issue was back (this time on the other line to the modem), so I rescheduled the previous work order (luckily I still had the email with the confirm, reschedule & cancel links in it).

The technician came to work on the issue on the 15th, stating that the problem was simply a clasp that had disconnected itself from the connection, so all he had to do was reclasp it & my internet was working at full capacity again.

After the got it working again, I was discussing the transfer rates with him & prorated refunds for time that the internet was not working at full capacity.  He explained that I would get an automatic prorated refund based on when the support ticket was opened, but this would only be fore the time that the ticket was opened (this means I'd only be getting back to the 14th, the 11th to the 13th I'd get stiffed on).  I stated that I might have to call CenturyLink's billing to try & get back the rest of it (stating that I had speedtest & call logs regarding the matter I could probably use as evidence to get the rest of it).

Beyond that, he also was talking to me about the capabilities of what I should be able to get in transfer rates on my home (this coming after I was speaking to my neighbor about his outage with CenturyLink, a full outage for a couple days in his case, but he was getting a MUCH FASTER transfer rate).  The technician stated that I should be able to get a higher transfer rate & for testing sake, he increased my upload rate to test it's capabilities.  While he increased it to 20 mbps for this testing period (which he was intending on lowering back to what CenturyLink is claiming what should be available in my area, despite my neighbors being able to get 100 mbps upload & 40 upload), I was getting roughly 13 mbps when I ran a speedtest with the elevated speeds.

It appears for the time being, he's going to leave it at the higher transfer rate (at least until CenturyLink's system kicks it back to the mere 3 that was assigned to me when I switched back to them in 2018).  For this reason, I decided I wouldn't be seeking the addition credit to my account for the 3 days that isn't going to be prorated in the automatic refund as it's going to improve my ability to continue doing stuff online (at least as long as the increased upload rate remains for the 3 days that did not count due to their not creating a support ticket during the original conversation on the 11th).

Note that I have not been streaming to Twitch since the switch to CenturyLink & the initial tests that made it clear I could not continue streaming online multiplayer games with only 3 mbps upload rate, only leaving the possibility for single player games that didn't rely on internet bandwidth for decent functionality.  However provided this upload rate sticks for a while, I may be able to go back to streaming to Twitch until it's lowered again (at that point we're back to the waiting game of waiting for either CenturyLink to wire the neighborhood with fiber and ultimately until Google Fiber becomes available in my area, which is probably the only thing that is going to end my boycott that is keeping me from putting my payment information on any Google service after YouTube allowed Bandai/Namco to go after my YouTube channel simply because of a link that went to a review of one of their games on my personal site that they didn't agree with).

Long story short, those that are following the channel can expect some more streams to Twitch (at least until the upload rate is lowered again), so it's a pleasant change after 4 days of hell of not being able to do half of what I've been attempting to get done, we'll just have to see how long it lasts before I have to stop streaming again...


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