CenturyLink is one of the biggest ISPs in the United States, providing internet, television, and phone services to millions of customers. However, like any other ISP, CenturyLink users sometimes experience problems with their services not functioning as they should. Here are the potential causes of the issues that you may be experiencing with your CenturyLink internet connection.
Outage in Your Area
Another typical cause of interruptions in CenturyLink services is an outage that affects your locality or area. CenturyLink, like all major ISPs, has occasional outages due to factors like CenturyLink, like all major ISPs, has occasional outages due to factors like:
- Losses are incurred from storms, accidents, construction mishaps, etc through the destruction of local network infrastructure.
- Malfunctions or glitches in their technology that lead to service interruptions.
- Excessive traffic congestion leading to overloaded network capacity.
The outages, once they occur, can black out services within an entire city or town. To confirm if CenturyLink has recognized an outage in your region, visit their webpage containing an outage map. Such large-scale blackouts can continue for hours or days before technicians can completely reestablish services in the affected areas.
To find out whether there is a restoration work timeline for an outage, you can go to CenturyLink’s support section. However, when it comes to major outages, there is not much that can be done other than wait for their crews to attend to the root cause of the issue.
Problems With Your Home pieces of equipment
Even if the general situation with CenturyLink internet connectivity seems fine, you may still face connection issues, which are related to your in-home networking equipment. Your Wi-Fi router, modem, cables, or other devices may be problematic and cause your internet connection to be disrupted even though the CenturyLink network is up and running.
Potential in-home equipment problems include:
- Broken Modem or Router which requires rebooting or replacement
- Malfunctioning, bent or rusty connectors, or cables that are frayed or of the wrong type
- Disturbance of Wi-Fi signals in your home due to, objects, walls distances, and so on.
- Malware, viruses, or any other security threats with connected devices
- Congested bandwidth which is caused by many devices in the house being connected to the internet.
The first thing that is usually done is resetting the CenturyLink modem and router to check whether it clears any minor issues. Replace the wires used for connecting the Ethernet cables too, to try out different cables. Be sure to inspect your Wi-Fi signal in various rooms to make sure there are no interference issues. Also, check for damages in all the equipment that may have occurred in the course of the accident.
If rebooting and testing your equipment does not allow connection restoration you may need CenturyLink to send replacement equipment. Or if your existing router is old and not capable enough, you could switch to a new model of router to get a better one.
Account or Billing Problems
Something not necessarily connected with CenturyLink access could be an account issue that blocks your connection even when the main service is running. Some examples of account problems that could interfere with connectivity include:
- Failure to pay a past due amount that results in the suspension of the service
- Unintentional cancellation or even termination of your account
- Delays in the activation of the new service
- Failure to change the DNS or email settings during the creation of the new account
Go to My CenturyLink account portal and ensure that the account status is correct. Check that your account is enabled, your balance is paid up (if not a zero balance, make sure there is no past due balance), and that all your services have been provisioned correctly. Also, ensure that other important settings such as DNS servers were not deleted or modified during any of the recent account changes. Correct any issues or mistakes encountered through the help of CenturyLink’s billing department or technical support whenever possible.
Temporary Network Congestion
At times when most customers are using the internet during the evening hours, streaming videos, playing online games, attending virtual meetings, etc., CenturyLink’s network becomes overcrowded and saturated. This can reduce the browsing speed to a crawl for those affected by this issue. The problem is more specifically customers with excess bandwidth demand at the same geographical location in a given time.
Visualize it as a huge traffic jam in a large superhighway that manages all the traffic movements in and out of the network across CenturyLink’s network. This chokepoint can reduce the service quality to the most irritating level.
It may help to disconnect some unnecessary devices from your home network for a while to decrease your bandwidth consumption. Also, do not engage in activities that require a lot of data such as watching HD videos during the time that congestion is expected to be at its highest. It is also normally possible to seek help from congestion by waiting until late into the night when fewer users are online in your area.
Delays due to hardware failure at local facilities
CenturyLink has a heavy reliance on infrastructure to offer services to the ultimate consumer. This includes locations such as central offices or remote terminals where essential network infrastructure resides. This means that if, for instance, a server, switch, or any power system in one of these sites develops a fault, it will affect the connectivity of homes and businesses that are served by that particular site.
Some of the outages that occur in CenturyLink can be attributed to the following facility-level hardware failures below; Normally, backup systems will try to redirect the traffic flow away from the affected location. However, if repairs are prolonged or the problem is significant enough, multiple customers may be disconnected simultaneously.
General Network Upgrades
Of course, attempts to enhance its infrastructure by CenturyLink can be the cause of some disruptions in the services. The company seeks to constantly enhance the capacities and technology available in the network coverage zones. This involves replacing existing equipment with new ones, providing extra fiber links, integrating new network architectures over existing infrastructures, and so on.
When such enhancements and modernization are in progress, they may involve controlled outages in localized zones. Most of the time, CenturyLink gives prior notice regarding these upgrade-related service interruptions. However, now and then, upgrade projects can also take longer than expected to be complete also.
Looking for any notices about scheduled network improvements and relevant time slots for the neighborhood can help answer some of the CenturyLink connection issues that happen unexpectedly and then go away shortly after that.
Calling Technical Support
If you keep receiving CenturyLink connectivity issues for some reason and ensure that there is no large-scale outage affecting your area at the root of it, then it is wise to call the help desk. The tech support team can perform various tests between your home and CenturyLink to identify the possible vulnerable points.
Technical support has internal monitoring tools that enable them to verify all the links right from the service delivery path to your house. They could identify if signals have to pass through some areas and get lost there, which pieces of equipment are not in phase with each other, etc Technical support can also look at the capacity status of the network gear serving your locality to determine if traffic jam is an issue.
As one of the most sophisticated technical support services, CenturyLink technical support is most likely to detect the real root of unexplained service issues. It can help to establish if the problem is on your side, meaning your equipment, or if it is CenturyLink’s fault. Also, support can file the requests properly to either send service technicians or deliver the new hardware depending on the outcome of their investigation.
If you want to avoid spending hours trying to fix problematic issues on your own, you must follow the following tips:
Dealing with recurring CenturyLink connection issues that hinder your work, entertainment, and social interactions can be very irritating. But before you spend hours attempting to reset a device or talking with a voice prompt – just call the technical support of CenturyLink. The tier 2 and tier 3 specialists have the master tools and network visibility that can show what is happening out of sight. If you call them early enough to save yourself some headaches, you can get your CenturyLink services back up and running faster.
Call (844) 340-6002 to get a new CenturyLink connection now!
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