Month: February 2006

NTL are really crap. If you have a choice between NTL and someone else check the competition out because they would be hard pushed to be as bad as NTL.
I have been complaining for over a month now that my connection is very slow in the evenings and every time I phone up I end up taking to someone in india who insists that we go through the same script every time.
It goes roughly as follows:
I supply a postcode and they are unable to find it on their system. I have told them repeatedly that the post code they have on their system for us is wrong. I give them the one they have on the sytem for us but we have moved from theh script a little bit. They inform me they still cannot find the post code (or cannot be bothered looking) so they ask me to get the mac address of the modem. I get the distinct feeling its easier for them to have the mac address.
Once armed with this they seem to find some details that could be ours. They then ask to speak to Jenny. I explain that I have been on the account for a long time now and they still insist that Jenny must come to the phone. They still don’t recognise my name on the account and insist that Jenny confirms I am who I say I am, utter shambles. Not only are they wasting my time they are wasting Jenny’s. What’s really frustrating is that we go through this EVERY time we have a problem which is failry frequently. Jenny tells them that I am authorized to be on the account so we continue (at this poing I know they have not updated any account details to reflect what they have learnt ie they have a bad postcode on their system and that I am an account holder).
I am then asked what firewalls, virus software etc I am using. If I tell them that I have anything running I will be asked to turn it off. They then ask me if I run any filesharing software, err no. I am then asked if I have a router connected to the modem, at this poing if you say yes you are in unknown territory because they won’t support that configuration (Their highly trained operatives are not highly trained in IT, they are highly trained in call handling times which means following a script). After some more questions which I have answered on several occassions dotted over the last month I eventually get the opportunity to get an engineer to come out.
Some people would be glad they got through etc but we have had an engineer out who changed our modem. I could have told them then what the problem is. The problem is as follows.
During the evenings our bandwidth drops to dial up speeds. It does not take a rocket scientist to realise that more people are coming on line in the evenings and NTL are not able to cope with the bandwidth.
My next port of call will be trading standards because we are paying for a 2Mb connection and its taking google.com up to 20 seconds to load. We are not getting what we are paying for by a longshot.
getting the following sort of speeds:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/speedtest.html?1139855238265
Mon, 13 Feb 2006 18:27:48 GMT
1st 128K took 563 ms = 232810 Bytes/sec = approx 1937 kbits/sec
2nd 128K took 531 ms = 246840 Bytes/sec = approx 2054 kbits/sec
3rd 128K took 531 ms = 246840 Bytes/sec = approx 2054 kbits/sec
4th 128K took 547 ms = 239620 Bytes/sec = approx 1994 kbits/sec
less that 3kbps.