Any CenturyLink customers here?

[KuJoe]

As of this week I have the option of switching from Comcast to CenturyLink at my apartment and CenturyLink will give us money to cover the cancellation fees if we want to. My biggest concern is IPv6 since I utilize IPv6 more than IPv4 on anything that's important to me, can anybody with CenturyLink confirm they offer native IPv6?

Their website doesn't say "yes we offer this" it just says a bunch of stuff about "IPv6 6RD" (IPv6 Rapid Deployment) and it makes it look like they have it but some of their FAQ says it's still in testing and their network isn't ready for it.

I contact their support and I asked them if their residential plans supported IPv6 and if so how big of a subnet was assigned to clients and what modems were compatible with it, their answer was "Yes, what is your address and what services would you like to order right now?" Trying to get any details was a bit painful but I can understand that their level 1 support probably doesn't know what IPv6 is (I've yet to meet one person at ANY ISP that knows what IPv6 is be it a level 1 tech or an engineer, I always get the same response "what's that?").

 

[TruvisT]

Dislike them like crazy. No one likes them down here but maybe they are better up there.

We are still stuck on IPv4, at least down here. Their modems they send you are ugh at best. Their newest one they sent me is glithed/broken. Just to get things to forward to my pfsense box correctly, I had to reset the modem over and over again till it switched into bridge mode correctly.

But on the subject of IPv6. As far as I know, they don't.

 

[KuJoe]

Their biggest selling point is that they are saying each apartment in the building will get a dedicated line instead of multiple apartments sharing one uplink so we won't see congestion during peak ours like we do now, but since I use IPv6 I never see any issues.



IPv4 Traceroute to Tampa:


3 10 ms 10 ms 12 ms xe-10-1-3-32767-sur03.arvada.co.denver.comcast.net [162.151.38.93]
4 13 ms 10 ms 19 ms xe-10-0-3-0-sur02.arvada.co.denver.comcast.net [68.86.128.98]
5 18 ms 11 ms 10 ms ae-21-0-ar01.aurora.co.denver.comcast.net [68.86.179.213]
6 15 ms 12 ms 12 ms 68.86.87.89
7 11 ms 11 ms 20 ms xe-3-0-1-0-pe01.910fifteenth.co.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.82.30]
8 12 ms 54 ms 22 ms 173.167.58.162
9 39 ms 57 ms 40 ms if-1-1-2-0.tcore1.PDI-Palo-Alto.as6453.net [66.198.127.85]
10 40 ms 40 ms 67 ms if-2-2.tcore2.PDI-Palo-Alto.as6453.net [66.198.127.2]
11 39 ms 40 ms 66 ms if-5-2.tcore2.SQN-San-Jose.as6453.net [64.86.21.1]
12 39 ms 44 ms 44 ms 209.58.116.14
13 91 ms 90 ms 87 ms 207.88.14.233.ptr.us.xo.net [207.88.14.233]
14 86 ms 85 ms 88 ms vb15.rar3.dallas-tx.us.xo.net [207.88.12.45]
15 92 ms 81 ms 81 ms ae0d0.mcr2.tampa-fl.us.xo.net [216.156.0.222]
16 81 ms 81 ms 90 ms ae1d0.mcr1.tampa-fl.us.xo.net [216.156.1.109]
17 96 ms 81 ms 82 ms 64.220.113.126.ptr.us.xo.net [64.220.113.126]

IPv6 Traceroute to Tampa: 


4 9 ms 12 ms 8 ms xe-10-0-3-0-sur02.arvada.co.denver.comcast.net [2001:558:1c0:e3::2]
5 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 2001:558:1c0:a3::1
6 15 ms 16 ms 14 ms he-3-9-0-0-cr01.denver.co.ibone.comcast.net [2001:558:0:f705::1]
7 28 ms 10 ms 10 ms ae14.edge3.Denver1.Level3.net [2001:1900:4:3::269]
8 25 ms 24 ms 24 ms vl-4040.edge2.Dallas1.Level3.net [2001:1900:4:1::3a]
9 77 ms 52 ms 52 ms vl-4044.edge2.Dallas1.Level3.net [2001:1900:4:1::32e]
10 53 ms 53 ms 56 ms vl-11.bar1.Tampa1.Level3.net [2001:1900:4:1::329]
11 53 ms 59 ms 53 ms WIDEOPENWES.bar1.Tampa1.Level3.net [2001:1900:2100::1f4a]
12 58 ms 66 ms 53 ms 2607:f3f0:0:1:2d0:ff:fea7:f000

*I only provided the hops in between routers, I removed the hops for my local network and the destination network.

 

[D. Strout]

I don't know anything about either, I'm just curious why you're thinking of switching? Lower price? Higher speeds for the price? That "dedicated line" bit is nice, but there are no guarantees that it will be any faster. Eventually congestion will catch up to you, that's my guarantee. And if you have decent speeds over IPv6 anyway, what does it matter? Most major services have IPv6 up and running. Only other (possible) advantage I can think of is that Centurylink isn't one of the "big bad guys" in terms of net neutrality, though for all I know they may be pushing for fast lanes too.

 

[Kalam]

Honestly the only company worse than Comcast is CenturyLink, and I'm pretty sure they take pride in that. My only two ISP choices are Comcast and CenturyLink, and as shit as Comcast is, you'd never, ever, convince me to switch.

The dedicated line bit is probably bullshit. It might be only you on the line, until it hits the apartment buildings DSLAM and then you're back together with everyone else.

 

[raindog308]

Probably not hugely relevant, but I had CenturyLink for 5+ years in Portland and they were fine. The only reason I switched to Comcast is that the best CenturyLink could do is 5/1, whereas Comcast does 50/10.

I'm still extremely frustrated that Frontier/Verizon FIOS is available a few blocks away but we're in "CenturyLink country" and there is no Frontier service. Oh well...Portland is likely to get Google Fiber soon.

 

[datarealm]

Their biggest selling point is that they are saying each apartment in the building will get a dedicated line instead of multiple apartments sharing one uplink so we won't see congestion during peak ours like we do now, but since I use IPv6 I never see any issues.

Dedicated line to.....?

That's always the "selling point" vs. cable companies.  "No sharing capacity with your neighbors!"

Which if course is bologne.  Everything aggregates somewhere.  Whether its your floor, building, neighborhood, DSLAM, etc.  There's a bottleneck "somewhere", the question of couse is who's bottleneck is worse.  The "where" of the bottleneck is rather irrelevant.

 

[KuJoe]

Within my building we have about 20 unhidden wireless APs and about 1/4th of them are things like "screw_FCC", "torrentcity", "piratedload" (not sure if it's supposed to be pirated load or pirate dload), etc... so my neighbors are probably burning through bandwidth and we don't need a 40/10Mbps link like we have now but during peak hours Netflix wasn't usable most of the time (we can get by on 10/1 like we had for years if it was consistently around that speed or even 8/3Mbps like we did when Comcast had an outage a few weeks back and we all shared my Freedom Pop hotspot).


I was mainly looking at it from a financial perspective since we could get roughly the same speed with less people on the line for quite a bit cheaper but IPv6 is a bigger need than speed and so far reliability has been great with Comcast so I don't think it's worth the risk.

 

[concerto49]

International bandwidth wise - have seen Century Link offer way better performance than Comcast. Comcast is just fragmented, even inter state and have lots of congestion.

Sure Century Link might not be as good locally, but should take into account trying to reach your content too (which might be far away).

 

[Kris]

International bandwidth wise - have seen Century Link offer way better performance than Comcast. Comcast is just fragmented, even inter state and have lots of congestion.

Sure Century Link might not be as good locally, but should take into account trying to reach your content too (which might be far away).

Never seen this in Colorado (with native v6) or Northeast (105 Mbps free upgrade due to FiOS competitive territory) 

I have seen CenturyLink firsthand backhaul local routes from Denver to LA and other location, that Comcast customers don't get thrown around. And barely 25Mbps. 

The Comcast iBone is pretty great and actually can offer lower latency for PoPs like Seattle / SpectrumNet for Comcast customers. 

I get MB/s out of the US, have yet to see poor Comcast quality across poor 2 locations. 

 

[Wintereise]

Century link is NOT qwest, as far as the residential net goes.

Lightcore offers shit performance, and Comcast is probably miles better in any ways you can compare the two.

If this was their business net (Savvis/qwest), that's a whole different ball game.