Just about every one of my customers on Cable Modem connections suffer from caching problems. By this I mean, go to the BBC news web site and find it's 3 hours out of date. It seems that Telewest and ntl cache a lot more information for a lot longer than for regular users on dialups. This is of course to keep costs down. The more content delivered from ntl or Telewest's hard disks in their caches, the less bandwidth they have to buy from their backbone providers.
Our ISDN 256kbit/s leased line here at work has 1:1 contention yet runs at half the speed of a regular cable line (512kbit/s). It costs in the region of £18'000 a year to have this service, so you really think it'll be as good through a £500 Cable Modem...?
The Internet is all about timely and accurate information, and between them, Telewest and ntl seem to have stuffed it completely.
I understand that Openworld customers suffer the same problems, although cannot vouch for this.
I live in Bishop's Cleeve just to the north of Cheltenham and can't get cable or ADSL in my home anyways. But if I could, I'd like to think the quality of the information was as good as it is from dialup, which is simply not the case at the moment - as many of my customers are finding out. Ho hum.
