— by Margie Doyle —
Following the CenturyLink outage (and restoration) on Saturday, Oct. 3, Orcas Issues was told to call the CenturyLink customer service representative should we become aware of any further service interruptions.
On Tuesday, Oct. 6, we heard from Orcas Issues’ readers that their service had been out and they had been unable to engage CenturyLink in resolving the problem.
Or here’s how the homeowner described his experience on Wednesday, Oct. 7:
“When I first called it in to their 800 number, went through the robotic answers, and then got a human being … he claimed it was a problem inside our house and that we’d have to pay at least $85 for a repair technician to come out and diagnose the problem. Instead, I had Kevin from Orcas Electric come out yesterday afternoon (for next to nothing), and he said we had no input signal and that the problem was clearly in CenturyLink’s network.
“When I repeated the exercise [Wednesday], they admitted it must be their problem and said they could get someone out here to fix it by next Monday! I told them I was traveling for a week starting tomorrow and the only person who’d be at home was my son.
“Then a call came in about noon from the local office, no doubt because of your intervention, and they said they had a switching problem that had been fixed, which indeed gave us back our landline service.
“But the internet was still down and was only fixed about 20 minutes ago after a technician came out and installed a new modem. Seems to work OK, but I’m still on edge.
“We are now back up, with both phone and internet service from CenturyLink, after having been down for over 50 hours.”
When Orcas Issues first heard of the problem on Tuesday, we contacted the CenturyLink customer service representative, who was traveling, but said he would be sure someone would look into the problem. We asked to be kept informed of the progress.
He emailed me on Wednesday morning, writing: “I just spoke again with our local folks and we aren’t showing any outages. It looks like these could be individual issues that will require a tech visit. I would suggest the affected parties call in for repair (on a cell phone since their land line is down) and that way we can get a tech out there.”
Later Wednesday morning, Debbie Martinez, the CenturyLink Plant Supervisor for the San Juan Islands called me on my phone to ask for the client information, which had been forwarded to her in an email. She assured us there was no problem on CenturyLink’s end, and explained what the problem had been on Saturday, Oct. 3. We suggested she contact the customer directly by responding to his email or by phone.
We specifically asked if we could publish her number so that other local customers might contact her should there be any future problems, and she unequivocally said yes, that is fine.
Her office number is 378-1531 and her email is Debbie.Martinez@centurylink.
Here’s hoping!
(Yawn). Yep. After a half dozen equally consternating incidents like this one I went to Orcas Online. I refuse to pay CenturyLink for that kind of “service”.
Ditto, Jake. I also went to Orcas on Line. I was getting half the bandwidth they promised. After the kerflufle, I took my laptop to OoL to have it exorcised. I am surmising that the download I was doing was interrupted, causing the problem. I am off the landline as soon as I can make reasonable changes. Have we considered the possibility that this is exactly the way that Century wants it to go?
I have had internet problems since late January 2015. They have sent out different workers…all very nice and doing what they can. The last one found a break somewhere between the main post up the road and my driveway…that was in july 2015 i said please fix it and the man put in the ticket and guess what NOTHING….NOTHING…now my phone is sounding like a fax, no i have my fax unplugged and i have tried other phones it is the line……and guess what i put in a ticket early last week and again NOTHING…..