Then I began to exhibit packet loss. For gaming/discord, it's a death knell. I isolated the source of packet loss to be within the CenturyLink network, basically between me and the first traceroute hop. (Also retroactively verified by switching ISPs)
CenturyLink as an _offering_ is great, but their company operations and customer support is... kafkaesque and absurd. They are beyond incompetent and seem to have neither the capacity nor desire to fix any real problems.
When talking with some of the technicians and support people, the insight into their world was sad and disappointing. What a ramshackle company.
I really hope nothing ever goes wrong in your network segment :)
That said I've been lucky, in the 6-7 years I've been on CL moving from Cox I've had 0 problems with my DSL, where I'll say there's something to be said for the old legacy 2-wire stuff. At least every 3-4 years, I'd have to have cox out to fix my cable terminations for suck-out (center conductor eventually contracts itself to lose contact with hot/cold over time) with the extreme heat in Phoenix, so it's been almost a nice change.
One of my best friends is an engineer at Cox in town, and still quip at him about their silly bandwidth caps. He says it's a topic at every all-hands meeting that even employees are tired of hearing from their friends and family that they hate their bandwidth caps. Cox was one of the last Cable MSO's to actually implement bandwidth caps, but eventually they realized every other scumbag Cable ISP in the country was doing so, that they were leaving too much money on the table. Everyone else is doing it, so why not them too.
It's cool providers have gig speeds now, but if you use all you bandwidth for a month in 3 days to start getting overage charges every month, it isn't cool for long. It took Google Fiber threatening Cox and CL in Phoenix to actually get them to start rolling out FTTH years ago, so at least Google was good for something.
Symmetric gigabit feels like a dream.
Cox, on the other hand, lacking literally any survival instinct or competitive sense, charged me $110 per month before taxes, and for only 1.25TB of data. For unlimited data, it was another $50. So I'm in to them for $160+ per month, for vastly inferior service. I hope CL stays healthy enough to keep our deal going because it's the best internet I've ever had. (CL's old DSL product, in contrast, sucks immensely.)