View Full Version : NTL rant :(
Man am I annoyed. I should have ranted about this a few days ago but meh.
Anyway as you may or may not know, I've been plagued with connection issues for my 1 Megabit NTL connection. About a week ago I phoned them up (wasting about an hour of my time) and compained, then found out the box was faulty, although not for the first time (it's had an engineer on it in the past). Anyway, NTL sent an engineer out last Thursday and he did his job and ended with an 'Right, you shouldn't have any more problems' before leaving.
Well, guess what? About 2 hours later I got disconnected, again. Then another 2-3 hours later I got disconnected once again. This continued..
Sigh. Now I'm gonna have to waste another hour or so waiting to talk to their tech support to get another engineer out. Meh!
/rant.
slartiBardfarst
17-11-2003, 01:43
i have a friend who used to be on ntl. he was constantly being cut off even after 2 new modems and an engineer playing with the local exchange box.
you should do what he did and make a note of the times and lengths he was unable to connect and all the phone calls made. write them a polite but firm letter asking them what they are going to do about it.
in the end they gave him 2 months off his bill.
Phoned up and they said they're making some changes over the course of today and tommorow.
Hopefully this will fix some problems such as slow speeds (I often get less than 700k download on my 1024k service..) and connectivity issues. /me hopes.
Problems havn't been getting any better, and to make matters worse the actual cable television has started to start glitching alot.
I phone NTL up today and complain, I make it quite clear that it's a box problem and that we had an engineer around who 'claimed' he had fixed it, but apparantly hasn't, since I still get disconnected.
How do I know it's a box problem? Because the box needs to be reset to regain connection, rebooting the computer solves nothing.
Anyway, the guy on the phone (who wasn't at all as helpful as most of the tech support people are) rambled on about aload of NTL jargon and then put me on hold. 20 minutes later he picked the phone back up and told me some steps to put me onto a new server. I followed his instructions to a tee and am now apparantly connected to a new server. What happens 3 hours later? I get disconnected! Argh!
I don't understand why they can't see that it is obviously a problem with the box and either send someone round again (who will actually fix it this time) or give me a cable modem!
I've given up phoning now, I've done it 5 times in a row, it's my dads turn to ring them up and wait on hold for an hour! :D
ntl just suck... full stop...
ive used them for aout a year.. and tbh ive had more problems than ever.
slow downloads, some downtime... im going over to BT in march... allthough ive now heard that bt suxx lol
yay :(
i cant count all the NTL threads in this forum... Thank god for ADSL
DaveMark
03-02-2004, 12:07
im on ntl and i know what u are talking about touch wood i have been ok recently but i have sufferd down time .. slow downloads .. and it just gets on ya tits .. im going blueyonda soon .. i here they are good
dave
Euphoria
03-02-2004, 12:21
My friend has MAJOR problems with his NTL connection. He has the 600k connection but was getting speeds equal to 56k... so they phoned up NTL and were told to turn off the modem for 2-3 minutes every 2-3 days. Since doing that all has been good. Also the new boxes NTL have are meant to be much better. :confused:
DaveMark
03-02-2004, 12:23
Originally posted by Euphoria
My friend has MAJOR problems with his NTL connection. He has the 600k connection but was getting speeds equal to 56k... so they phoned up NTL and were told to turn off the modem for 2-3 minutes every 2-3 days. Since doing that all has been good. Also the new boxes NTL have are meant to be much better. :confused:
dont that defeat the allways on allways connected slogan :S lol (apart from 2-3 mins aday when u have to reset ya modem lol
dave
Euphoria
03-02-2004, 12:25
Kinda what I thought!!! Oh well at least you all have broadband!!! I'm on 56k until BT get their A**E into gear and install the cabling here! July sometime apparantelly (cant spell).
Only have very minor and infrequent problems with my NTL cable modem at home, but when something does go wrong, it takes forever for NTL to do anything, and that's AFTER you manage to get through to them.
Nick
DaveMark, ive had to do that whole "turn your modem off for 2-3 mins" and it does work lol ! omg ntl and work in the ssame sentence... this cant be right..
but i cant wait till i get rid of ntl and get me new bt...
horahh !
Originally posted by DaveMark
im on ntl and i know what u are talking about touch wood i have been ok recently but i have sufferd down time .. slow downloads .. and it just gets on ya tits .. im going blueyonda soon .. i here they are good
I take it you are moving house then, since NTL and Blueyonder (Telewest) cover different parts of the country, i.e. you can't switch between them (unlike ADSL).
Cheers,
Stephen
Fireblade
03-02-2004, 13:48
Originally posted by Melve
... i cant wait till i get rid of ntl and get me new bt...
horahh !
Why on earth choose BT if you've already heard they're $h1t Melve :confused: There are plenty of other broadband ISP's around who are rated far higher than BT!
You should consider alternative options at the very least, and to that end... a quick read of the info and advice available on sites like ADSL Guide (http://www.adslguide.org/), ADSL Resource (http://www.adslresource.co.uk/catalog/) and ISP Rreview (http://www.ispreview.co.uk/) (among others) will help get you on the right track... be it for the cheapest, fastest, or maybe to help you find an ISP in your local area ;)
njg291075
03-02-2004, 14:28
I too had problems with NTLs 1Mb service in the lead up to Xmas and shortly afterwards.
Since they finished playing around with the load balancing the problems have stopped.
Word to the wise tho - don't put an 802.11b AP near NTL boxes (tv and modem) as they appear to both operate @ 2.4Ghz :)
mrochester
04-02-2004, 16:15
Ha ha, I'm so glad I live in a Telwest area :p Blueyonder works flawlessly and if you ever need to call them, I've found them to be very quick at answering the phone. I had some teething problems when I first had broadband installed, but Telewest very efficiently sent an engineer around to fix it. Nice one!
Michael.
davidmoore83
07-04-2004, 01:34
on a different note on NTL my house was robbed and all my tecnics seperates, xbox and games, DVD player and DVDs and so much more went......it was the NTL engineers that were in 2 weeks previous who cased the joint!!! What a wonderful company!
bleecher
07-04-2004, 01:47
Originally posted by davidmoore83
on a different note on NTL my house was robbed and all my tecnics seperates, xbox and games, DVD player and DVDs and so much more went......it was the NTL engineers that were in 2 weeks previous who cased the joint!!! What a wonderful company!
wow, hoed u find that out ?
davidmoore83
07-04-2004, 02:40
well they were meant to be carrying out work in the basement but i found one of them in my room on the 3rd floor....when the police were taking details about the theft i told them about this and the local CID branch collared them....dunno how must have tracked them etc
sorry to hear that man, just shows what kind of cowboys ntl hire.
wozzizname
07-04-2004, 10:36
Some of these cable companies contract out a lot of their work, so you don't know what kind of checks or training the bloke who turns up at your house has had.
Something to look at with your disconnection problems with NTL.
Check your MAC address of your network card - go to the command line, and type ipconfig /all. If your physical (or MAC) address is all zeros then you've got a minor problem. I had a disconnection problem with NTL for ages at my old man's house.
Every couple of hours it'd lose connection and the whole shooting match had to be rebooted. Turns out that my network adapter didn't assign a MAC address to the card, as do many apparently, and it was conflicting with probably another several 100 users on the NTL network who also had MAC addresses of 00-00-00-00-00-00.
If thats not the problem.. no idea but it's worth a try.
My 1 meg connection with NTL is great! Not had to reboot in oooh.. months now! I'm quite surprised really.. I was having a right time with them for a while. I wish i'd gone for ADSL now, I forget the provider but they supply a static IP. When my contract with NTL runs out, I'll be moving over for sure.
nothing wrong with ntl at all.... not for me anyway...
started off in the cambridge area with them, went from 512 to 1mb with no probs...
moved to the northampton franchise, nope no problems at all... I had one outage recently, but that turned out to be a failure in the roadside box and it was sorted without me needing to call them as it was planned maintenance...
ntl are a great provider... but i wish they would hurry up with the 2mb service...
are they threatening with a 2meg service? I'll have some of that if so. Would be nice if they upped the upstream speed as I'm hosting now. Ok, hosting my own site but all the same.
Ive been with NTL for over 2 years now, and overall i am pleased with their service, the only downtimes i have ever had were caused by hardware failures and maintenance work at their end.
Until recently i was routing through NewYork in the USA to get to servers etc in London, ones based on the Verio network especially. This has now been sorted out and the network has been improved greatly for routing to London.
My only worry is that once 2mb is released there network will grind to a halt, as it is basically saturated as it is. This was one of the reasons people started to get routed through the states in the first place, it takes a major strain off the network in the UK.
As for static IPs etc with NTL, although they are not officially static IPs, i have had the same IP now for over a year, it only changed when i replaced the NIC the STB is connected to and so the MAC address changed too.
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