My company currently carries at least a dozen accounts with Century Link formerly Embarq. They inlcude a T-1 line that cost our company thousands of dollars to have put in place, local lines, and a long distance account.

We have carried the long distance account less then a year. Since Novemeber of 2009 there have been issues we have had with them. Due to the nature of our buisness we send payment to Century Link for our monthly long distance bill by sending them two checks every month. This is due to internal department billing our company has to do, as we currently are both a state and privately run company.

What has lead me to make this complaint was our most recent incident. Thursday Century Link suspended our long distance service claiming non payment.

What had actually occurred was their accounts payable had miss-applied our January's long distance payment to the wrong account. This was not the first time this had happened but it was the first time it resulted in them terminating our service.

The first time this happened was in November of 2009. It took multiple requests to get them to fix the error. It was not fixed until mid to late January 2010.

They fix one problem only to then repeat it again on Febuary 9, 2010.
All that time they neglected to fix their error they had been assessing our company late fees for the account.

When I called on Thursday, I spent four hours with at least 10 different reps from their company.
They refused to return our service.

The issue they had was our Febuary payment which was now slightly past due. It had been issued to them through our corporate office had not arrived yet. Or if it had, may have been miss-applied as well.

The sum of what we owed them for Febuary was 252.00
When I state slightly past due it was only 2 days past 30 days.

To get them to return our service we had to issue them another payment by phone.
Which we had no choice but to do. As our company had just spent $10, 000.00 on advertising for the same weekend we were suspended.

We lost the first day of that advertising due to this situation.

Now I can only wait to see what happens with the payments that had been made through our corporate office. As I requested they do not get applied to any account and be mailed back to our company.

I spent a great deal of time trying to get this situation properly assesed and fixed. Only to end up with our company still having to pay charges applied to our bill for their errors, and having to issue double payment to this account.

As for charges, I advise every buisness customer to pay closer attention to their bill from this company.

When I was researching what went wrong and looking for our payments, I discovered that Century Link does not apply your payment as it is sent to them.

Prior to them posting the payment, they deduct nominal dollar amounts from our it.
They describe this as a late fee.

The situation here is this: when they post the payment to the account it is less what they deducted but that deducted amount never gets applied to any balance that you are carrying. To help clarify this:

You send them $200.00 for a $200.00 bill
When they post that payment it only posts as $198.00 against the bill.

so your statment reads like this:

previous balance $200.00
Payments/adjustments ($198.00)
balance $2.00
Total new charges $200.00
Total amount due $202.00

Turn to page three of your statemnt, you will find your check in it's original amount
payment -200.00
late fee 2.00

Payment to account -198.00

So what happened to that other $2.00 ?
How many companies lost one or two dollars off their payments every month?

How much money is Century Link collecting this way?

Our private company is a developer they plan to put 20, 000 homes in this area. The T-1 line was put in because Embarq wanted to have access to those future customers.

I certainly hope Century Link does not get that buisness.

With any luck Comcast will make it's way to this area.
As that company has much freindlier rates,
Customer service, and better service all around.
Not to mention when they make errors, they dont charge you for them.