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CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

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Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#111

Post by School-Cotton »

gtdawg wrote: post #109
waffle_ss wrote: post #38

The original article title is more accurate. Replacing "CenturyLink" with "Utah ISP" as if they're some podunk lil' no-name ISP is misleading. CenturyLink is a Tier 1 ISP, and 5th largest in the country by customer count. Maybe city folk haven't heard of CenturyLink but they have monopolies over vast swathes of rural copper networks.

They purchased Level(3) who already previously owned Global Crossing, Savvis Video and Genuity, among other acquisitions. The Level(3) name was much more memorable in the carrier/enterprise/ISP field and it feels like they are starting from scratch on brand recognition, because as you said, lots of people haven't heard of Centurylink before. Edit: And as noted by the thread "CenturyLink is totally shady.", Centurylin…

I had CenturyLink service (in Phoenix) for years before I had ever heard of Level(3). I'd be really surprised if Level(3) has more brand recognition among the general public than CenturyLink does.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#112

Post by Someone1234 »

arnonejoe wrote: post #72

5G will put century link out of business.

If it can achieve 1 Gbit/s as advertised and scale to enough customers? It just might.

But I'm going to be interested to hear the first real customer's experiences. For example what is the latency they're seeing? Weather outages? How well does it handle peak hours?

Don't misunderstand, the current ISP competition in much of the US is super toxic, and I don't support it. But 5G promises a whole lot, and I cannot ignore the technical side of why it may fall short.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#113

Post by School-Cotton »

kawfey wrote: post #44
JohnFen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So, the fault here lies with the politician." No. The fault lies with CenturyLink. They're the ones who decided to implement this in the most repulsive way allowed by law. The law only required notification using normal communications methods, not disruption of services. CenturyLink is the one who chose disruption of services.

Why in the world was this the decision they came up with?

To sell their filtering product.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#114

Post by gtdawg »

School-Cotton wrote: post #111
gtdawg wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They purchased Level(3) who already previously owned Global Crossing, Savvis Video and Genuity, among other acquisitions. The Level(3) name was much more memorable in the carrier/enterprise/ISP field and it feels like they are starting from scratch on brand recognition, because as you said, lots of people haven't heard of Centurylink before. Edit: And as noted by the thread "CenturyLink is totally shady.", Centurylin…

I had CenturyLink service (in Phoenix) for years before I had ever heard of Level(3). I'd be really surprised if Level(3) has more brand recognition among the general public than CenturyLink does.

On the retail, general consumer side: Level(3) doesn't have much of any brand recognition. That's why I said "carrier/enterprise/ISP".

On the business side, it has quite a bit of premium name recognition which seems to be getting thrown away from the way they are being swallowed up.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#115

Post by theandrewbailey »

chrisweekly wrote: post #76
peteradio wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws should be written specifically. It should be expected that they will go obsolete and it should be routine to expunge/replace laws as tech changes. If they meant email they should have put email.

Disagree. Lawmakers are so clueless about technology. Insisting that they take in more responsibility for specifying precise technical details is the last thing we should do.

Writing a law that says "send an email" is the exact detail needed. In this situation, that is not the technical details that legislators should be staying away from.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#116

Post by otakucode »

"that the consumer may request material harmful to minors be blocked under Subsection (1)(a)" absolutely unequivocally does NOT translate to "inform the customer that they can pay for filtering themselves". The law really clearly puts the burden on the ISP to perform the filtering, and requires the ISP to inform the customer that they can request the filtering be turned on - not that the customer can purchase some product that does filtering.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#117

Post by gtdawg »

snapwich wrote: post #106
waffle_ss wrote: post #38

The original article title is more accurate. Replacing "CenturyLink" with "Utah ISP" as if they're some podunk lil' no-name ISP is misleading. CenturyLink is a Tier 1 ISP, and 5th largest in the country by customer count. Maybe city folk haven't heard of CenturyLink but they have monopolies over vast swathes of rural copper networks.

Yeah that's my bad. I thought saying Utah ISP might highlight that this is currently only a Utah issue and CenturyLink isn't blocking everyone's traffic... I think.

If the title said just Centurylink instead of Utah, people would be complaining of click bait, so I think Utah was the better choice. Using "Centurylink (only in Utah)" or something similar would have been the most ideal from an accuracy POV.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#118

Post by ndarwincorn »

gtdawg wrote: post #109
waffle_ss wrote: post #38

The original article title is more accurate. Replacing "CenturyLink" with "Utah ISP" as if they're some podunk lil' no-name ISP is misleading. CenturyLink is a Tier 1 ISP, and 5th largest in the country by customer count. Maybe city folk haven't heard of CenturyLink but they have monopolies over vast swathes of rural copper networks.

They purchased Level(3) who already previously owned Global Crossing, Savvis Video and Genuity, among other acquisitions. The Level(3) name was much more memorable in the carrier/enterprise/ISP field and it feels like they are starting from scratch on brand recognition, because as you said, lots of people haven't heard of Centurylink before. Edit: And as noted by the thread "CenturyLink is totally shady.", Centurylin…

What? Level3 was huge as a fiber ISP at the enterprise level, but Qwest/CenturyLink has been a huge phone service/ISP in the west since the breakup of Ma Bell. They own the naming rights to the Seahawks's stadium.

They have huge brand recognition in the West, though you're right, little of it's positive. I remember a cover article in my sleepy mountain town's alt/leftist newspaper titled 'Qworst' when I was growing up.

Full disclosure I work at a shop that switched to CL fiber (e.g. Layer3) per my recommendation on coming on. The service quality/uptime is top-notch but the sales/PM process has left a lot to be desired.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#119

Post by wahern »

blattimwind wrote: post #52
kingbirdy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your constitutional protections are protections from the government, not businesses.

This isn't necessarily true. E.g. the fourth amendment applies, according to precedent, to communications service providers in at least some capacity.

In their capacity as agents of the government.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#120

Post by logfromblammo »

I saw something similar with a hotel wi-fi setup.

In order to reach the Internet, you have to agree to the hotel's terms of service. The page to accept the terms of service is presented by redirecting any HTTP request from an unauthorized device. But (!) the redirect page was resolved by DNS, and DNS traffic to the Internet is also blocked. Only the local DNS resolver is accessible.

The instant any machine that specifies a specific DNS resolver tries to connect, the attempted redirect fails silently. In order to get things working, you have to clear your DNS settings to use the DHCP-specified DNS resolver, click the "accept" button on the redirect page, and then re-enter your previous DNS settings.

I wasn't so much angry that this was happening, than angry that they did such a ham-handed, botched job of it. If you're going to block outside DNS, you have to redirect to an IP address rather than a DNS-resolved address.

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