Problems with NTL Broadband

[Stan Sted]

Anyone out there having serious problems with NTL broadband? Or would it be easier to ask if any NTL Broadband owners are not having problems!

I had the £25 a month 600MB service fitted six weeks ago and for the first two weeks it was superb. Since then I have lost connection for long periods every day and have lost the service for whole weekends. Over the Christmas holiday the service was so poor I had access to the internet for a total of only about two hours. On Boxing Day I managed to get on for only 1 min and 25 seconds!

I have phoned the tech support helpline (4p a minute, they claim) at least seven times, each time waiting more than an hour just to get through to the techies.

On one occasion when I complained that my service was erratic and always failing the techie said: "Well sir, you have to pay more for a better service, in fact, I pay more than £40 a month with another company to make sure I get a good service". When I phoned NTL sales to confirm this they were horrified with the techie's attitude and said I should have an excellent service for £25 a month.

Just before Christmas after another phone call to the techie support service, an engineer was sent round to check my line. He found no problem but thought the cable modem was suspect. He changed it and changed the USB line. Unfortunately he connected the new cable to the computer leaving the old cable connected to the modem. It was six hours before I discovered the blunder, but once the modem and computer were connected there was still no network service.

A day later I complained and managed to speak to a chief Techie, who certainly knew his stuff and during a check on my line he did discover what appeared to be an intermittent fault on the line, either in the street or where it comes into the house. However, it could not be fixed over Christmas. I am waiting for another engineer to call.

I have not been encouraged to continue with NTL since finding a website set up by angry customers and callled NTHell.

Scores of people appear to be in the same boat as me and the problem seems to point to a dodgy network that cannot support the half million subscribers.

Any other PPRuNers having problems?

SS

[Mr A Tis]

Well, I went for the cheaper £15 a month version three months ago.
The installation engineer completelty ballsed up the hook-up having waited all day for him to arrive.
This meant another day waiting to be re-installed.
This time it worked - but they did charge me from the original installation date.

I have to say though it has been brilliant & I have had no service failures whatsoever since the above was sorted.

I've been with NTL / C & W & Nynex since they started and have to say, if anything goes wrong, you are completely Donald Ducked because they must have about the worst customer service of any company I have ever come accross.

Good Luck

[Stan Sted]

Perhaps it depends where you live. I am in a smallish town in West Essex, not too far from STN. A mate at Duxford also has the £25 service but has had few problems, apart from getting online at busy times (after schools turn out and weekends).

I have sent these messages from an office BT Broadband line. Needless to say, my home service is still u/s.

[Stan Sted]

I have just been informed that the website NTHell, where NTL customers can post there many, many protests about the company, is errr...ummmm hosted by NTL!!!!

Seems they run it to find out where problems are arising so that they can be sorted out quickly.

I think if I was the boss of NTL I'd rather put my efforts into providing a first class helpline service where customers do not have to wait an hour of more for assistance and can talk to people who fix problems quickly and efficiently. In other words, let's have more helpline phones and more people to answer them.

Hell's bells! Now I have found a site called NTLHeaven (identical in style to NTHell) except that it is full of positive stories about NTL. Seems there are as many happy customers as there are angry ones.

Here's hoping I will end up in NTLParadise. Will report back when I am back on line at home, assuming I am back long enough to rattle off a message.

[etsd0001]

I have the 600k NTL BB service and have had no problems (famous last words).

I recommend theNTLHellword website as the time I had a problem with the fault reporting service I posted on the hellworld site and got phone call from the NTL fault call-centre manager a couple of days later wanting more details to prevent it happening again.

[Stan Sted]

The following will give you an idea of the nonsense I have been patiently putting up with for the past two weeks.

The chief techie (good guy) phones my home to see how things went over Christmas. He was horrified to hear we had less than two hours use despite numerous attempts to log on to send Xmas greetings, digital pics to relatives, read PPRuNe etc. He decides there is a serious problem with the supply to the house and offers to get an engineer round within two hours.

The engineer arrives on time, turns on the modem, plugs in his test equipment and announces there is nothing wrong with the signal and there is nothing he could do. My wife calls me on my mobile and asks me to explain the problem to the engineer. I told him the whole story and said he was there to do the checks for the chief techie. He says there is nothing he can do, but he would report the matter to a network engineer who would have to come to check the signal from the cable box in the street and wider into the network.

So there we have it. We are back to square one and I will no doubt have to spend a hour waiting to talk to Chief Techie to report yet another day of non connection, despite the visit of an engineer. The Good Guy is doing his best but the rest of the troops....well, words just fail me!

NTL Heaven seems as far away as ever.

Can anyone advise me on BT Broadband.

[Stan Sted]

Hi de hi folks

I managed to get back on line again after re-connecting to my good old BT 44,000bps connection at £15 a month. So far it is taking about 1 to 2 minutes to call up a page on PPRuNe but that is a damn sight more impressive than the four days it has taken so far to reinstate my £25 a month NTL Broadband 600.

The two little green monitor symbols at the bottom right hand corner of the screen, denoting a BT internet connection, are currently glowing away merrily alongside a huge great red X which shows a very dead NTL service.

[Stan Sted]

I decided to get up at 0400 to see what lights were flashing on the cable modem and amazingly found the SYNC and RDY were steady and D/S flashing only occasionally. I fired up the PC and was amazed to connect immediately to the net.

Now, at 0525, the lights are still steady. I wonder if the network will still be OK at 0900-1000 when I normally lose the signal?

[Stan Sted]

The boffins must have tweaked the network overnight because at 1000 here I am with the fastest connection I have had since I had the NTL600 installed.

The internet speedometer on Norton System Doctor is pointing towards 2 o'clock or lower instead of the 10 to 11 o'clock during the rare times I had a connection over the past two weeks.

So far so good. I might even start praising NTL Broadband if the connection continues like this.

[Stan Sted]

Having been out from noon to 1700 I returned to find a dead NTL connection. Since then it has been up and down like a bloody yo-yo, staying on for at most, 1 min and 4 seconds.

I am now back on the BT link.

[The Invisible Man]

Hi Stan,

I've had NTL broadband for a while with no problems at all. The NThell website is a valuble source of information and they are extremely helpful at resoving problems. If you haven't already done so, may I suggest you post your problem on NThell website and see what response you get. I think a few of the Mods are techies too.

Good luck.

[Gertrude the Wombat]

I've had the service for a couple of years now, and most of the time it works fine (apart from the news servers, which have been crap for at least a year).

It is terribly frustrating when it breaks, as it does from time to time, and they do find some things easier to fix than others.

Any NTL broadband user who hasn't come across Robin Walker's site here (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/) should have a look.

[Stan Sted]

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.

[goeasy]

Stan,
Really feel frustrated for the problems you have had!

I have been on NTL BB for about 9 months now in Bishops Stortford, and have had great quality of service. However a couple of times the service has dropped off for an hour or two, but I have just called their 0800 number and been told that x,y, and z areas had problems that were being worked on.

I feel you were probably just unlucky to have two faults close to home, and it certainly seems that cable srvice is a bit more sensitive to irregularities than analog lines.

Wish you all the best for continued great service. As an idea... I downgraded to the 128kb £15 service a few months ago, and find it almost as fast for pprune and the like.

[Stan Sted]

Thanks goeasy

It certainly is a great relief to be able to sit at the puter and get on the web instantly. But for the past three weeks or so I had to check the lights on the cable modem before even considering a surfing session. At least I did have my old BTInternet as a back up, but that was coughing and spluttering much of the time.

Now I can shut down the BT service saving £15 a month and get shot of my second BT phone line saving a further £12 a month. NTL Broadband at £24.99 now does seem excellent value.

Cheers

SS

[Hamrah]

Stan,

as you know, I have been on NTL Broadband (initially in Sawbridgeworth, Herts, and now Redhill Surrey) for 18 months. I also have a broadband connection at home in Cardiff....and have never had a problem. I recently upgraded to the 1mb service in Redhill (improves my VPN access to my office network) and it was all done over the phone in 10 minutes.

As they roll out broadband, it is obvious that they are going to find weak links in the cable network. Hope it stays good for you from here on.

H

[Stan Sted]

Thanks H

The connection is still going great guns.

I know you have been a long time fan of NTLBroadband, it is one of the reasons why I decided to switch from BT. Several other PPRuNers in the West Essex/Herts area are big fans and have been in touch with me to try to help overcome problems I have had.

But despite all the tinkering and tweaking of computer settings and the advice from tech experts on helplines, it came down to two major faults in the network. It is a pity that it took so long to find and rectify them. Still, that's water under the bridge (or water in the works). Hopefully I will now get to enjoy years of unfailing service.

[Navy_Adversary]

Even though I live in the heart of the Nevada desert;) I am having NTL broadband connected on Wednesday:rolleyes:
I have been with BTO anytime(150), and I have to say I have been satisfied with the service but feel that now is the time to upgrade to broadband.
By changing from BT to NTL I will save around £200 in the next 12 months, time will tell if the £24.99 for NTLs 600K is money well spent

[Flopsie]

Gobsmacked to hear about the problems in the UK. I moved from sunny ABZ last year to HAM and have been using flatrate DSL since without any hassles. The charge inc. line rental is 42 Euros/mth (approx 25GBP). I use my existing phone line and was upgraded free of charge to 1.5Mb/s up/down. There is no comparison to my old 56k modem and recently downloaded Logitechs Image Studio (40MB) in around 3 mins. Hope they get broadband sorted before I get back!!

[malanda]

Stan - I just tried to "Private Msg" you, but your mailbox is full.

[Ronbmy]

The only problem I have with NTL bb is that the box locks up from time to time.

This is an RFI problem that I have taken up with the box manufacturers. Being a radio amateur i'm used to this type of problem - I can cause it if I transmit too much power.

It is worth resetting the box every now and then. Turn it off then unplug it for twenty seconds. Plug it back into the mains BUT DO NOT turn the box on 'til you see two non-flashing green leds on the display.

The above also helps when you have a local cber using illegal power or dirty mains.