US Internet continues to be a problem, especially for small businesses, it’s a total ripoff. First up you have to deal with the sales charlatans, reading from a script, clueless about the technology. Todays first email included this classic:

“I wanted to clear something up before processing the order. The quote was is for 50M which is 50 megabit not megabyte as I had stated earlier. “

CenturyLink VAR.

Typically though, retail/consumer internet is sold as Mb(megabits), while it’s uncommon for commercial internet to be sold as MB(megabytes), it can be. After all, they sell you on a different class of service than residential/commercial and the debate about protocol overhead and seven or eight bits to a byte. Otherwise, literally what’s the difference between residential and commercial?

At home I have a Gigabit fiber optic CenturyLink service, I pay a “PriceForLife” flat fee of $85. I’m lucky. It’s a bit slow today, but I can’t tell. Speedtest tells me it’s 475 Mbps. Normally I get up around 700Mbps download.

Comcast offer fiber optic, but their minimum bundle includes a phone line we don’t need, and a cable modem which offers their standard “public” Wi-Fi. Price $169.

Centurylink tell me they only sell DSL to our office. A 3rd party sold Centurylink Fiber to the prior business in the same suite, they had a 250Mbps service, over fiber. Effectively Centurylink offer the service, but force you to go via a 3rd party. So asked same 3rd to quote.

Their quote was 50MB, which works out circa 8*50MB = 400Mbps. $109 per month, I have the emails where I specifically asked. Even at $109, the service is 2x the price I pay for at home, at 50Mbps, it’s just 0.05Gbps and totally overpriced.

What did I do, called Comcast back, got a discount for 2-years, and will have a do-over then. Total waste of time. If anyone from CenturyLink reads this, and wants to explain, I’d loved to have remained a CenturyLink customer.