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Review by chazz13 
UPDATED: 62 days ago
member for 189 days, 9 visits, last login: 59 days ago
 Commerce,Hunt,TX
 $55 per month
 "none"
 "frequent outages and slowdowns - support is terrible"
 "lousy service but no real choice here"
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(ratings well below consensus)
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totally unreliable. never know whether it will be working or if it does what speed i might get. endured a 12+ hour outage yesterday and speed is currently 10% of what i am paying for. at this point i don't think i could recommend embarq to anyone for dsl. unfortunately don't have much choice here.
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Review by bogmanray
Posted: 79 days ago
member for 2.9 years, 20 visits, last login: 8 days ago
Las Vegas,Clark,NV
Contract price not specified.
"It work"
"It's slow"
"Poor but better than Cable"
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Service ok but slow. Much better than Cox cable which is a total joke.
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Review by sadsack123
Posted: 108 days ago
member for 108 days, 1 visits, last login: 107 days ago
Erwin,Unicoi,TN
$110 per month
 about 15 days
"very inconsistent service"
"reliable service but not as advertised"
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paying for 5000/1500 the first 5 minutes of service is as advertised. Then after a few hundred tests and a few months of testing it is more consistent with 768/768 uncanny but the truth. I am going back to cheaper service of 1500/768 and save some money. good side i rarely lose connection and they do provide free security software. It is just too inconsistent with speed tests and when i use embarq speed test tools i am running at an average of 4700/748 and everyone elses which i consider this the most reliable im at 900/740. This is my 3rd isp provider having been with the dinosaur aol and and very good and consistent verizon service in another state. Stay tuned because they swear they can fix my problems will give it another month and cross my fingers. All things considered if they could give me consistent speed all the time i would give them 5 stars on everything
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 Review by Time
UPDATED: 119 days ago
member for 6.3 years, 1477 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Las Vegas,Clark,NV
$19 per month (12 month contract)
about 5 days
"Fast customer service, good uptime so far."
"1.5 Mbps is my only available option."
"The price is right if you bundle."
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The service has been great for the past few days, I'll have to update my review after the first month.
I ordered Embarq DSL early last week and had service live by time I returned home from a trip. The only downside is the lack of availability in my area, hopefully CenturyLink can produce better results.
------------------------
UPDATE: I couldn't live with 1.5 Mbps. I went back to Cox.
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Review by (hidden by request)
Posted: 128 days ago
(review was emailed from domain gmail.com)
Las Vegas,Clark,NV
$35 per month (6 month contract)
 Sprint
"It was OK for 10 years; good value lately for 512k up, 3m down."
"It has gotten steadily worse since Jan 2009, to no service at all."
"Once good, now very bad."
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I'm typing this review from Cox, which has been my provider since 4 PM
on Bastille Day (today). I had sprint/embarq for 11 years; and
eventually that service went into a death spiral, culminating in 2 weeks
of essentially no service.
My experiences with embarq may not be typical of Vegas; I was off the
"west-west Las Vegas" station which has been reporting latency "issues"
since March, with a supposed (recent estimate) fix time of August.
The service started to become remarkably worse in January. According to
the technician who was at the house last week, that is when the DSL
"service" -- which I guess consists of the servers and some amount of
line switching -- was sold to a 3rd party. We went through long periods
of no connection in the winter, followed by periods of terrible latency
-- sometimes it would takes 20 seconds to serve a page -- to last week,
when a connection would be found, but the wait time to serve a page was
effectively infinite.
Meanwhile, two trends have become noticeable: the help personnel have
remained nice and empathetic, and the communication of problems, from
the sainted CEOs above to the help personnel and users, has been flushed
down the toilet. It is no longer possible to get a ticket number, and
call the 2nd-tier technician back; you must always go through tier 1
support, and start afresh. Many times I was required to do "speed
tests", when it was obvious the latency was so bad I would never be able
to maintain an open socket on the embarq speed test page. The tier 2
phone techs could diagnose my dsl modem from afar, reset it, and found
no problems with the line; but they requested that a field technician be
sent to my house to check the integrity of the lines. One tier 2 tech
insisted that every bit of "telephone line" in my house had to be cat 5.
OK, they would make sure the field tech replaced all the line.
Except for one problem. The field techs have no way to receive a case
history of the phone tech diagnosis. Remember, embarq is a
communication company; but they have no way to communicate with the
field techs, by e-mail or otherwise, what should be done. And none of
them are allowed to know about any technical problems that exist in the
stations, until they insist on that knowledge.
In our case, the technician came to out house 4 hours after the
appointment time, and we told him what he was supposed to do: install a
line splitter and check the integrity of the wiring. He did install the
splitter, and found the line quality was fine, then plugged his own
laptop and modem into the dsl port... and got the same problem, terrible
latency. He then called in to find out if there were hardware problems
on the other end, and was subjected to the same annoying menus we faced,
and spent a bizarre amount of time getting through to tier 2 support.
He kept probing them till they acknowledged that gosh, the station he
runs off has been having problems since at least March, and wasn't
expected to have a fix soon.
The field tech was quite angry by this point, but kept his outward cool.
He did suggest that unless we got a clear sign of improvement soon, we
should "seek other options". I called the help desk again, humored the
tier 1 techs with more unreachable speed tests, told them what the tech
(who had been there an hour before) had found, and finally cajoled my
way into tier 2. Point blank I asked about the latency issue, and for
the first time, the phone techs looked to see if there were reports of
slowdown for my part of Vegas. And lo! They were stunned to see the
outage had gone on for over 4 months, with no clear completion date. I
finally got what was supposed to be a more direct number.
A day after the technician left, service partly came back; and now we
were overjoyed, codependent, victims of the Stockholm syndrome. Then we
went back to no service. I called the direct number, found it was
incorrect (sent me to Embarq business service), got in the queue for
tier 1 support. At 6:30, the queue was at least 22 minutes.
Shortly after I called Cox, got installation today, on time, and am
typing this now.
Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I'm free at last.
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Review by denimdonnie
UPDATED: 129 days ago
member for 136 days, 4 visits, last login: 120 days ago
Okeechobee,Okeechobee,FL
$188 per month (24 month contract)
"Speed, when it works"
"Constant drops, terrible tech support solutions, and terrible phone waits."
"Avoid Embarq in South Florida"
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Update: Seems the wrong people were being contacted. They figured out the issue and repaired it. I will be re-modifing the review after a few days, so I can give a fair review.
I've had Embarq at our residence for almost 30 years. We've added all the new features as they've come in over the years. About two years ago, we dropped our comcast and went to Embarq DSL. Since that time, it has only been the biggest hassle. We got like $300+ in charges where it was "On our side," and the issue still hasn't been resolved.
Every time we get a tech, they say reset the modem.....how many times to you need to press that button with a pin, before it works?
Most resent ticket was put in a week ago and today. Still no help, and the techs said it was my router (new reason, even though I've removed the router from the equation).
I don't typically dog internet companies, but Embarq never owns up for it's issues in our case, and always fails to deliver.
I understand this has been my experience and not every gets as bad support as okeechobee florida.
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Review by garrepa2
Posted: 148 days ago
member for 8 years, 102 visits, last login: 38 days ago
Naples,Collier,FL
$20 per month
about 1 days
"none"
"slow, bad tech support"
"its cheap. you get what you pay for. Only slightly better than dial up"
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Had it for over a year. Routinely drops. Speed stinks. The only good thing was installation where I called, went and picked up unit, and it was running next day. Other local option is Comcast at double the cost and 12 times the speed. I'd avoid unless you really only need very light internet access.
Followup comments:  garrepa2
join:2001-10-19
Agoura Hills, CA | Avoid in SW FL Might be better in places other than SW FL. | |
| | 
Embarq_Joey
VIP
join:2008-09-22 | Re: Avoid in SW FL Sorry you are having trouble with your DSL. Can I help? Send me an IM with your phone number and I'll check it out for you. | |
| | | |
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Review by ozar
UPDATED: 188 days ago
member for 1.6 years, 606 visits, last login: a few hours ago
USA
$103 per month (24 month contract)
about 3 days
"Occasionally able to get decent speeds for this area"
"Speeds drop off a great deal several times daily, must reboot modem every few hours"
"Horrible service overall, expect much better performance considering monthly payment"
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The only other options available to me in this area are dial-up, cable, and satellite. The cable service in this area is down quite often for no apparent reason, so I didn't consider that as a viable alternative.
I'm currently on the "Up to 10.0M download / 896k upload" package and the price I've listed for this review includes my regular phone line, plus the DSL service.
The initial order process (about 5 or 6 years ago) went fine and while it was a self-installation, the actual DSL signal was reaching my line in about 3 days and I was up and running. I started out with the 645 Series modem supplied by Sprint/Embarq and the 1.5 M download package, then I upgraded when 3 M package was available, then again when 5 M download package became available. In all cases, the upgrade was totally painless and without any effort on my part. However, when I recently upgraded to the 10 M downloads package, Embarq sent me a new modem (Embarq EQ-660R) that was supposed to be easy to install, but it turned out to be very problematic and took several different Embarq support techs a number of hours to get things so that I was up and running again.
The newly supplied modem drops the DSL sync signal quite often, but intermittently. In fact, it will sometimes drop out about every 5 or 10 minutes during the evening, then the signal re-syncs and you can connect again. Another thing that I've noticed that happens frequently is that the speed will suddenly drop drastically and I get download speeds around 5M/7M. Rebooting the modem will usually get things going faster again.
I recently replaced the ISP supplied modem with a D-link DSL-2540B modem/router and have not lost sync again since doing so. I've also not noticed the degraded speeds suddenly appearing, but I'm not certain just yet that all is fixed, as it's only been a few days since the ISP modem was replaced.
Update (04-28-09): the speed of my 10 Mb/s connection has dropped to about 2 or 3 Mb/s and stayed there over the last 4 days. Rebooting the modem doesn't seem to help speed it up any longer.
Update (05-17-09): just wanted to update my review to say that the speed finally did move much closer to the 10 Mb/s that I pay for, but I'm back to having to reboot the modem every few hours, or sooner, in order to maintain decent speeds. I'd definitely give Embarq a lower score for connection reliability if there was a lower score available. Otherwise, their DSL services are mediocre. Hopefully, the CenturyTel/Embarq merger will bring some improvements, but I've learned through experience not to count on it. Time will tell, and I'll be back here to report on whatever happens, either way.
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Review by djenner
UPDATED: 190 days ago
member for 10.3 years, 256 visits, last login: 15 days ago
Brinnon,Jefferson,WA
$59 per month
"Embarq is the only high speed Internet service available other than satellite in our rural area."
"Embarq is unable, or unwilling, to consistently provide the advertised and purchased bandpass."
"No alternative."
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We are "at the end of the line" in a rural, Washington community. We waited years for Sprint (now Embarq) to finally provide DSL service. At our location, Embarq advertises three tier service: 1, 3, and 5 Mbits/sec. We purchased 5 Mbits/sec. We actually occasionally achieve 4.8 Mbits/sec. However, the speed drops to the lowest level several times a year until I complain and they "fix it."
Getting the speed "fixed" is excruciatingly difficult. Every time you must call up a low level technician who insists that you reboot everything and won't pass on the troubleshooting until at least an hour is wasted on the phone. You may get upgraded to a higher level technician when you finally convince them that the problem is theirs. It then takes a day or two for some sort of resolution. You are never notified of the resolution or what the problem was.
One time, after spending an inordinate amount of time with the technical support people, I was finally told that THEY DID NOT HAVE THE BANDWIDTH CAPACITY TO HANDLE MY SERVICE BECAUSE THEY HAD ADDED TOO MANY NEW CUSTOMERS. I filed a complaint with the FTC for fraudulent advertising and failure to provide what I was buying. It took months to return to the 5 Mbit/sec service. I received NO compensation for Embarq's fraudulent business practices.
Having to go through this routine several times a year is very disconcerting. As I said in the bottom line, there is no alternative to Embarq DSL other than satellite.
I cannot recommend Embarq to anyone who wishes to deal with a good company. It's the only show in town, and the alternatives are dialup or satellite, both of which are unacceptable in this day and age. Unfortunately, Embarq is also unacceptable.
***************
Well it's less than a month later and here we go again. Download and upload speeds are 1/4 what I pay for. What a fraudulent operation. I wish there were an alternative.
Followup comments:
Embarq_Joey
VIP
join:2008-09-22
| Service Issues Not sure if you know, but I'm here to help out Embarq customers with DSL issues. If you weren't getting what you were paying for something needs to be looked at. IM me your DSL # at anytime and I can look into this for you.
Thanks,
Joey H.
EMBARQ Customer Outreach
reachout@embarq.com | |
| 
Tarheels Fan
Premium
join:2006-01-05 | Fraudulent? Did you take embarq on their offer of support from your previous rant? | |
| djenner
join:1999-07-17
Seattle, WA
 ·Embarq
| Rant? Rants are misplaced or misdirected criticism. There is nothing misplaced or misdirected about the service Embarq provides for me. It is amongst the worst of any service I have or have ever had. Of course I took them up on their offer. The problems is, no matter how effective it is at one instant in time, it does not last. Embarq is simply incompetent (or fraudulent) and is unable (or unwilling) to provide the service they advertise and I pay for. | |
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Review by tuxmckloud
Posted: 228 days ago
member for 3.8 years, 11 visits, last login: 25 days ago
Emerald Isle,Carteret,NC
$59 per month (month by month)
about 3 days
"Fast shipment of DSL modem(s) and installation"
"customer service and support"
"just not worth the customer service headaches"
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I had Road Runner for years and was happy except for the occasional loss of connection in high winds. So I cut my RR services to lite (19.95/mnt), and tried Embarq DSL on a month-to-month basis. I opted for high speed (5Mb/764Kb) at $59.95.
I had DSL in California, so I tried my 2Wire Home Portal 1000HG. It would not work no matter what I tried.
Embarq sent two EQ-660R ADSL modems. One would not work. The other took about 20 minutes to finally connect.
dslreports.com speed tests showed 4.8Mb/684Kb. I was reasonably happy with those speeds. However, there was a noticeable delay when I tried to surf some websites (most notably yahoo.com and google.com). iTunes downloads seemed to slow down too (perhaps part of their TOS ?)
As I was paying my bill online (NOT late), I lost my landlines and DSL. I waited for about 30 minutes then called Embarq customer support, and reconnected my computer to my cable modem (thank goodness it still worked!) The CSR created a ticket and told me that they should respond in about 2 days (it was Saturday). Two days had elapsed and I called them back late Monday afternoon. They could not find any open tickets, and suggested that I take my screw driver and try to disconnect/reconnect the wires.
About 30 minutes after I hung up, the phones were back on. I don't know what the problem was, but clearly it wasn't something I fixed.
I honestly tried to find an alternative to RR, but Embarq isn't it. The CSRs are nice, but just not very helpful. I tried to get a complete refund, but they wouldn't go for it. Embarq doesn't want their modems, so I have two DSL modems up for grabs if you need a spare.
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What tier do you have?
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