I am delighted to report that my NTL Broadband is flying...best it has been since it was installed seven weeks ago. And the cause of my problems: faults in two junction boxes nearest to my home. A few adjustments and modifications and now all is well.
It is a pity the problem took three weeks to rectify even after numerous phone calls to the helpline, a crop of unanswered emails to tech support and visits to my home by two engineers, one of whom replaced a cable modem.
But to be fair, it was an intermittent fault and both times the engineers called the signal was reasonable strong and steady. As soon as they went away it dropped to zero. However, during a long phone call with a chief techie he was able to use equipment that monitored my signal at the precise moment I had a total failure and he put the network checks in hand.
I did submit my case to the NTHell website and was given some very good advice by customers and NTL techies who monitor the site in their free time.
However, I think it was the chief techie I spoke to just after Xmas who organised the network checks which uncovered the problems.
I would also like to praise NTL's customer care line, which I contacted yesterday to ask how I could claim a refund for lost service. I was told that they were fully aware of my problem and that all my connection failures (which must have run into hundreds) were automatically logged since I first registered on Nov 8. I was given a full two month refund. I was also put through to a broadband engineer who explained how the problem had been solved. From dialing to talk with the refund official to ending the chat with the engineer took only about six minutes.
It is a pity NTL cannot offer the same high level of service with their tech support phone lines where I usually waited more than an hour to get through to a real person after listening to terrible recorded messages and boring music.