History: I've had CentruyLink DSL for a few years. Until recently, the service had a lot of intermittent outages, most of which could be fixed by a telephone call and asking them to "rebuild my profile".
They started offering Prism TV about a year ago. I've received a lot of calls and mailings promoting the service. I didn't sign up primarily because of the DSL outages. I also had a concern about there only being two hi-def channels available at a time.
On one of the recent calls, the representative gave a "final" monthly cost that would save me about $60 over what I am paying for combined DirecTV and CentruyLink services. That with other perks, taken together, finally convinced me to make the change.
Prism advantages vs. the DirecTV that I had:
- Package saves $60/month
- "Whole Home" DVR
- Smaller, better looking boxes
- Easier/cleaner to connect; one cable (Cat5) vs. four (2 coax, one Cat5, one telephone)
- Service during rainstorms
- Quicker channel changes
- Internet speed increase if not watching TV (20 Mbps vs. 10)
- A much better router
- One bill to pay (vs. two)
- $100 rebate
- $50 off first month
Even if DirecTV could match the cost and aesthetics issues, there is nothing they can do about internet speed and simplicity advantages.
3/18/2013: Two days after installation, I am very pleased with the new Prism system. The only way I can imagine being disappointed is if there is significant service interruption or billing problems. I will continue to add followup comments as time goes by.
3/20/2013: Several hours after the above post, we began to see "freezing". This would last from several seconds to a minute or so at a time, and would repeat at random but frequent intervals. I called, the tech said she could not see any problem on the line or in the router, so would send a tech out the next day (yesterday). After the call, speedtest.net showed that I was getting 20mbps down during a TV freeze. Power cycling the router seemed to fix the problem for 45 minutes to an hour at a time.
A very helpful tech (Carlos), came out yesterday and spent several hours here. We actually were not having real problems yesterday before he got here, but "fortunately" we did see them while he was here. Also, we began to see crazy fluctuations in reported download speeds using speedtest.net and the CenturyLink speed test site. He tried a number of fixes. First, he replaced the router. The original router showed a lot of errors, and by the s/n he could tell that it was a refurbished unit. Next, he checked the wiring at the NID and made new connections - the guy who ran the temporary "on top of the ground" cable from the box several hundred feet away had tightened the connector nuts so much that the wires were flattened almost to the breaking point. We still saw speed and picture issues, so Carlos then changed the ports in the DSLAM down the street.
Items of note:
- My router is for ADSL and uses two pair. I need an ADSL router because of the distance to the DSLAM (3000 ft.). The VDSL router uses only one pair in neighborhoods where people are very close to the DSLAMs. They have a newer "combination" router that replaces both, and may be worth a try.
- I am almost at the maximum distance for 2 hi-def streams. This makes me wonder how many other people around here will get Prism, as there are only a few closer to the DSLAM than I am.
- The installer said that the router should be plugged directly into the wall, not into my UPS to avoid "voltage changes". I asked Carlos about this and he confirmed that is what they have been told, but agrees that it makes little sense. Once things are stable, I will change to UPS power, although I now wish I had one with sine wave output.
3/21/2013: After yesterdays comments, I noticed we could not pause or rewind live TV. I called, and the agent was at first going to schedule a tech to come out, but then asked me to power cycle the router, and she then remotely rebooted the DVR and other boxes. That fixed the recording problem, but we still saw a few short duration freezes yesterday afternoon on HGTV. Looking at the guide, adjacent channels were not frozen. The problem went away and has not returned yet. Internet speed is very good (20mbps+)
5/11/2014: I should have been paying more attention to the interest in this blog. Over the last six months I've been consistently getting speeds of 25 Mb/s down and 1 Mb/s up even while watching one HD channel. TV usage sometimes seems to have more of an affect on internet speed than at others. Speedtest.net just said 13 Mb/s down, 1 Mb/s up while watching two HD channels and recording one more. (Yes, I can have three simultaneous HD streams with no problem, despite what I was initially told.) I do still miss DirecTV's remote and user interface. In lots of ways it just seemed "easier" to do things with DirecTV.
