Hey, #centurylink, if you want to play with the big boys, you are going to have to invest in qualified people. Not people who take out business networks for hours at a time.

I was looking forward to starting my Labor Day vacation a little early today, but that’s not going to happen. About 2am this morning Centurylink made some changes to their network (both my home DSL circuit and my father’s, who lives an hour away, got new DHCP address) and the network at the office went down completely.

When I called, the automated voice told me that they were aware of the outage and that it would be fixed by 4pm.

Now:

a) in what universe is a business class circuit allowed to have a 14 hour outage?

b) who does a major network change on a Friday?

c) who does a major network change on a Friday before a major holiday?

d) If you can’t plan an outage, including disaster recovery, to last less than an hour or two, get out of the business.

This was on top of a routing loop last week that almost cost me a major customer (since we had a demo planned and couldn’t reach the server we needed).

I waited a couple of hours and then decided I wanted to vent. So I called Centurylink back. I didn’t expect it to get anything fixed faster but I figured I’d at least get a “mea culpa” and a little “we screwed up – sorry”.

The monkey in first level who answered the call not only did not apologize, but seemed to act if 14 hour outages were normal. When I explained to him that my business depends on that circuit and in fact we’d flown a guy up from Atlanta in order to work today (but that couldn’t happen from the office, now could it) he dismissed my concerns with “well, it’s an area outage, not just your circuit”.

I then pointed out that my home DSL line was fine, and since I live 10 miles from the office it obviously wasn’t an “area outage”. His suggestion? We needed to upgrade to a T1.

A T1? Was is this, 1993?

When I pointed out that a T1 was only 1.544 Mbps he told me I was wrong, that it was much faster than the 10 Mbps I was getting now. I suggested that there might be some sort of technology one could run over a T1 that would result in higher realized speeds (i.e. DSL over a T1 versus a POTS line) and that must be what he was referring to, he continued to insist that a T1 was much faster.

(sigh)

I then asked to speak to a manager, and was told I couldn’t but that the monkey would be happy to relay any concerns I had.

I’m going to do it myself after the Time Warner guy gets back to me with my new office circuit. I recommend that anyone running a business that depends on Internet access stay as far as possible away from Centurylink, and that probably goes for voice service as well considering the level of customer support they find acceptable.