I went into our local CenturyLink office this week (Tuesday, February 19) to check out Prism availability (I heard rumors of deployment). The sales rep was able to confirm availability in my area (I currently qualify for 40Mbps service from my neighborhood DSLAM (Peterson Rd & Stetson Hills Blvd). The sales rep had green lights all around so I opted to give the service a shot.
I went with the Prism TV Premium package and asked to keep the internet speeds as high as possible. The sales rep stated I could go up to 20Mbps (I guess Prism needs a 20Mbps allocation out of your total internet service package).
Fast forward to today. I woke up this morning to no internet. I began checking out the modem and doing a typical reset which did not help. My browser kept being forwarded to the new DSL installation site endlessly (ran it to completion one time). So I dialed up CenturyLink do get their side of the story.
About 10 minutes later, I receive a call on my cell phone from a CenturyLink technician letting me know he was around the corner and scheduled to come out to test the line for the Prism service (I never received a call from CentruryLink telling me this would happen). The technician confirmed the outage was likely due to the Prism order but that the line block should not have been put in place until right before the actual installation (scheduled for Monday, February 25). Regardless, I was happy to have a technician on site who knew what was up. He went about his business and I continued to jabber with the Centurylink technical support rep.
My entire conversation with CenturyLink technical support consisted of endless transfers to try to get a hold of the right people in this elusive "Security Department" so they could remove the silly block from my line. This all seemed like a case of miscommunication during the CenturyLink order process but still a pain in the butt to untangle.
The technician completed his tests at my house demark and proceeded down to the neighborhood DSLAM. I received a call from the technician a few minutes later informing me that the neighborhood DSLAM was not certified for Prism yet. A bad case of the Marketing Department beating the technicians to the punch I guess.
The good news was that the technician said he was able to get someone out today from the certification side to rush the process. I guess after the box is certified there is some testing the technician has to come back out for but he was confident he would have time to wrap it up before my installation date next Monday. Just a hat tip to this technician for going above and beyond what he was probably required to do.
I just wanted to throw out some anecdotes for those in the Colorado Springs area that might be considering ordering Prism right now. We are definitely on the forefront of the roll out so I would expect some hiccups along the way. I hope that some of this will help answer any questions others might have that sales reps cannot answer.
I will post a review after I get my service up and running (keeping my fingers crossed).