I have been with Qwest for just over 10 years a couple years ago they offered 7Mbps connection which I upgraded to when it was available in my area. I consistantly had speeds on my Playstation3 speed test of between 4.9 and 5.3Mbps during the evening and up to about 5.6Mbps after 11PM MST.
My wife called them the other day for something and the (now centurylink) customer service representative told her that upgrading to the 12 Mbps connection would only cost 3 dollars more, my wife agreed and they told her to wait til Friday after 5PM and unplug and restart the modem. I did that and went and checked my speeds to my Playstation expecting a nice increase in speed. But when I ran the speed test on my playstation it returned a speed of 2.9 Mbps down and 702.8 Kbps up. Now Call of Duty is nearly unplayable. Bad lag and kicked out of a game half way through. I checked the speed at DSLreports.com and about the exact same result. I logged in to my modem and it reports the higher tier speed. If I run a "centurylink" speed test, it reports 11.3 Mbps with 800 Kbps up.
To me, it is obvious that I took a speed hit because online gaming has degraded so much and my game console speed report is significantly slower. I called centurylink and they had me do the same things I already did and then told me since the speed test at centurylink reported I was getting within 80% of the advertised speed that there was nothing they could do for me. I spoke to a supervisor and told her about the hit in speeds to my devices and she told me that I was receiving a higher speed and that I should contact my device manufacturers to see why I am not receiving that speed.
I find it odd that just the day before, all of these devices worked perfectly fine and recieved much higher speeds at a lower advertised bandwidth. I am confident that my devices are working properly. Is centurylink using a different standard to test their speeds or are they "fudging the numbers" to justify charging more for less bandwidth?
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