The original article title is more accurate. Replacing "CenturyLink" with "Utah ISP" as if they're some podunk lil' no-name ISP is misleading.
CenturyLink is a Tier 1 ISP, and 5th largest in the country by customer count. Maybe city folk haven't heard of CenturyLink but they have monopolies over vast swathes of rural copper networks.
They purchased Level(3) who already previously owned Global Crossing, Savvis Video and Genuity, among other acquisitions.
The Level(3) name was much more memorable in the carrier/enterprise/ISP field and it feels like they are starting from scratch on brand recognition, because as you said, lots of people haven't heard of Centurylink before.
Edit: And as noted by the thread "CenturyLink is totally shady.", Centurylink's retail consumer reputation is quite tarnished (as are most large consumer ISP companies) and mixing that reputation with Level(3) was a bad decision, IMO.
What? Level3 was huge as a fiber ISP at the enterprise level, but Qwest/CenturyLink has been a huge phone service/ISP in the west since the breakup of Ma Bell. They own the naming rights to the Seahawks's stadium.
They have huge brand recognition in the West, though you're right, little of it's positive. I remember a cover article in my sleepy mountain town's alt/leftist newspaper titled 'Qworst' when I was growing up.
Full disclosure I work at a shop that switched to CL fiber (e.g. Layer3) per my recommendation on coming on. The service quality/uptime is top-notch but the sales/PM process has left a lot to be desired.
True, I did forget about the Qwest acquisition from Centurylink because that was so long ago (to my memory). I do remember the days when routing problems and outages with Qwest in public forums always led to the 'Qworst' name popping up.
I also work for a shop that I recommended Level(3) DIA fiber/Layer 3 services on about 1.5 years ago. Now that it's CL, not much has changed on service or reliability.
The sales people however are still trying to expand their grasp into our organization so it's always a battle there.
I had CenturyLink service (in Phoenix) for years before I had ever heard of Level(3). I'd be really surprised if Level(3) has more brand recognition among the general public than CenturyLink does.
Yeah that's my bad. I thought saying Utah ISP might highlight that this is currently only a Utah issue and CenturyLink isn't blocking everyone's traffic... I think.
If the title said just Centurylink instead of Utah, people would be complaining of click bait, so I think Utah was the better choice. Using "Centurylink (only in Utah)" or something similar would have been the most ideal from an accuracy POV.
They're into some major metros. While it's theoretically nice to have competition for Comcast, it'd be nice if that competition weren't at least as shady...
CenturyLink is a Tier 1 ISP, and 5th largest in the country by customer count. Maybe city folk haven't heard of CenturyLink but they have monopolies over vast swathes of rural copper networks.