CenturyLink's new fiber Internet? (house, neighborhood, live)

[otowi]

Has anyone switched from Xfinity, etc., to CenturyLink's new fiber Internet? Had some door-to-door people come by last night and they put a dedicated line in for your house with speeds in the 900s. They are now also offering TV service - although not their own - they're partnering with AT&T TV and a few other providers. And they still have the same old land-line phones. Just curious if anyone made the switch for any of their services and what their experiences were like.

[LHS79]

Originally Posted by otowi

Has anyone switched from Xfinity, etc., to CenturyLink's new fiber Internet? Had some door-to-door people come by last night and they put a dedicated line in for your house with speeds in the 900s. They are now also offering TV service - although not their own - they're partnering with AT&T TV and a few other providers. And they still have the same old land-line phones. Just curious if anyone made the switch for any of their services and what their experiences were like.

Did not know they were doing this- sounds good.

I am using their DSL and have the "lifetime" rate of $40/month for 25mbs or something like that. Works very well for what I use it for.

Had Xfinity and loved the speed with them- after the promo expired they would not budge on rates that were much higher than the first year.

I thought CL shut down the Prism TV service since it was so bad.

[otowi]

I didn't see/hear anything about Prism - so maybe so - but they apparently partner with AT&T to provide TV as well as some streaming services and a few other providers I guess. The dedicated fiber to your house so you're not sharing your Internet with your neighbors fighting for speed, etc., is appealing, but I do think their TV offering is not quite as good as Xfinity. With Xfinity, I have my home phone and cell phone and they have great rates on cell and they work together well - I can get my home phone calls on my cell, I can see who is calling on my TV screen if it is turned on, etc. But, they're pretty pricey overall, aside from the great deals for cellular.

[Even_Stephen]

I moved to The Springs in May. I live just north of downtown. I signed up for CL fiber first thing. The fiber was already run to my house. I've never had Xfinity, though their cable also goes to my house.

I got a $65 per month for life deal. 1gbs up and down. Internet only. Landline phone is available. TV available, but it's some deal through AT&T. Might even be satellite. I don't know since I didn't sign up.

Anyway, the service has been good. Installation was easy. Tech came in, hooked up the fiber to a small (looks like a small router) ONT inside my house. Ethernet cable to a "modem" that CL supplied for free. The modem is actually a combination DSL modem, ethernet router, and 2-band wi-fi router. The modem feature is not needed for fiber unless you also have landline phone.

I get pretty close to advertised speeds, which I think are 940 up and down. (You can never get the full 1 G speed because of network overhead.)

The CL-supplied modem/router is decent but not great. Has good wi-fi range. But I have a lot of devices and as I brought more of them online, the router needed to be reset fairly often. So I think it doesn't handle lots of devices well.

I bought my own router, a modest TP-Link A9. It handles all my devices much better. I put the CL router in the closet and will only bring it back out if I have connection problems and need CL tech help in the future.

One word on using your own router - CL uses both PPPoE authentication and VLAN tagging. Not all routers can do both of these things. In particular, some of the more popular mesh routers can't. So check the specs before you buy.

Someone mentioned that with fiber, you would never compete with other customers for bandwidth. That is not true. All the individual fiber drops terminate somewhere in a box down the street, where they are connected to a fiber backbone to the central location. So if that box is pretty full of connections to your neighbors who are all streaming and playing games the same time as you, there will be slow downs. It's just that you are less likely to notice with fiber than with older technologies.

Having said all that, my next door neighbor has cable internet from Xfinity. He is very happy with it. So in my neighborhood, at least, there are two decent choices for now.

[otowi]

Originally Posted by Even_Stephen

I moved to The Springs in May. I live just north of downtown. I signed up for CL fiber first thing. The fiber was already run to my house. I've never had Xfinity, though their cable also goes to my house.

Thanks for the info! My Xfinity Internet etc. is working fine for me right now and your post is enough for me to decide that I don't need to switch right now but I'll keep it in mind for the future.