CenturyLink Internet: Cable & Fiber Internet Review
Centurylink is a telecommunication company that is part of Lumen Technologies. The service empowers residential and small businesses with traditional land fiber networks, high-speed internet, voice, phone, and TV services.
Pros
Cons
Quick Stats
In this article, we'll walk you through Centurylink top perks, pricing, and solutions it offers to help businesses get the best advantage of their phone system. Let's get right to it.
Centurylink VoIP Features
Centurylink helps you keep your customers and teams and connected with the ability to add more lines and scale up whenever your business requires more advanced features. The basic features presented by the service include: Voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, and call forwarding. But if you're business requires more features, you can always tier up with Centurylink.
In a nutshell, here are the main features:
Mobile and remote access
Managing your business, taking calls, and accessing the system from your device adds more flexibility and allows doing tasks from anywhere. Centurylink allows full access from any compatible device. Employees can also do tasks and work remotely, making it easy to connect distanced teams and keep the business running no matter the circumstances.
Mobility
a large number of missed calls and the lack of professional assistance can be a deal-breaker, especially for eCommerce, retail, and online stores, no one also finds it okay to wait for too long on a line, that's why Centurylink offers mobility features like Follow-Me Call Routing and Remote Office, these features ensure that your customers are always satisfied with the level of customer support they get, never transferred to the wrong department or left on the line without proper assistance.
Security
Centurylink bears in mind the sensitivity of some information making it a good fit for financial services, the healthcare sector, and banking purposes. The company uses end-to-end encryption and fraud detector to maintain the user's information safe and allow access to secure communication options.
Flexible plans based on the business size
Centurylink offers a month-to-month and 3 years package, allowing each business to pick the pricing plan that fits best with your budget. The website dedicated a page for medium-size businesses with 20 employees or more. Medium businesses can make use of the following features:
- Hosted VoIP
- Next-generation SIP voice
- SIP trunking
- Unified communication and collaboration
- Unified communication manager cloud
- Conferencing
- Cloud contact center
- International and local voice services
Featured based on the phone types
Centurylink lists its features and cost under two main types of service: Traditional phone and Digital Phone. The features listed under each type are basic and can be scaled up based on a discussion you can have with one of the company's agents.
- Traditional Phone: Traditional landline service offers clear, high‑quality calling, voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, and call forwarding. This plan is best for regularly conducting conference calls, ensuring reliable connection for elevators and point-of-sale credit processing, and using phone lines for fax machines or alarm systems.
- Digital Phone: Business VoIP provides an advanced phone system and features, voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, easy-to-use admin portal, instant messaging, file sharing, and video/audio conferencing.
This plan is also best for allowing mobile or remote employees to access the office calling features out of the office or at home, providing a solution for automatic updates and maintenance without having to invest in an IT staff, and advanced calling feature needs without having to purchase and support additional hardware.
Centurylink Pricing
Prices for CenturyLink service vary depending on business size and plan, but the one thing that isn't different is the consistency of their prices. That means no matter the plan you sign up for, the price will be the same for the duration of your billing agreement. They don't ask you to sign a contract to keep that rate, either.
If your business requires more advanced features, Centurylink offers the following as add-ons: Auto-attendant, call recording, group paging, hunt group, and office anywhere portal.
Prices for the VoIP services aren't clearly disclosed on the website, but if you want to get an idea about the estimated cost, it's better to reach out to one of the company's representatives. However, you can see the full features on the website in detail with a fairly good explanation of each solution's details, which we reviewed to know whether or not the service is with it.
If you don't need the bells and whistles of the advanced features, you should be fine choosing the basic plan. However, the company offers the following two main plans for digital phone and more advanced features:
| Premium Line |
Premium Line with Unified Communications |
|
|---|---|---|
| Premium Calling Features | Included | Included |
| 24/7 Support | Included | Included |
| Automatic Upgrades and Maintenance | Included | Included |
|
Business Communicator App |
Not included | Included |
| Outlook Directory | Not included | Included |
| Instant Messaging | Not included | Included |
| Click to Dial From Desktop Phone | Not included | Included |
Ease of Use
Centurylink, unlike some other VoIP providers, doesn't require any IT support to set up or run, the system setup and settings are a breeze, with the ability to add lines and adjust the options to meet the business requirements. Furthermore, there are extra extensions and advanced features available with additional on-site hardware.
The service also has a user-friendly and simple admin portal to make the necessary adjustments and make the system suitable to what you expect it to do. Actually, the system's simplicity makes it a great option for small or growing businesses.
Customer Support
Centurylink assists its customers via live chat, phone calls, and email. You can call one of the company's agents directly at 800-871-9244, on Monday-Friday, from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. MT, and Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. MT.
You can also refer to the help center or the blogs for more details about the company, the help center includes information about almost every general topic you have in mind, including billing, account management, equipment and service help, troubleshooting, and many other topics.
The company also has different social media accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, so that you can keep up with the newest products and the latest news about the service.
Final Verdict
Centurylink is a good option for you if you run a small or growing business, the best perk of the service is the simplicity and its user-friendly interface that almost any user can get familiar with and make changes to it. However, the prices aren't clearly disclosed on the website, which means you have to reach out to one of the company's representatives to learn more about the cost.