Broadband virtually dead in BH area

[seasick]

Hmm... Is it just me or has broadband been up and down like er... something that goes up and down very quickly (?) in the Bournemouth area for the past four or five days?

If I get up the basic diags on my STB (page up, page down, blue) I'm getting error reports such as 'Periodic ranging fails' and 'Ranging fails', etc. I presume this means that a big chunk of upstream equipment is dead/dying and NTL simply haven't got around to sorting it out yet.

I phoned NTL last Thursday and they said there was a problem, but I'm just wondering if anyone else is affected / has any info.

[funkyhitman]

Hi there, I'm living in the BH9 area and have had intermittent broadband connection drops for the past week. It's been much worse the past few days mainly in the evening from around 5:30 - 10:30. I lose the connection every 5-10 mins for about 3-5 mins.

I spoke to tech support today and they informed me that a few other people in the area have reported similar issues, thus have now agreed to get a network engineer out to take a look at the setup. I guess he'll look at the green box thingy in the street. I don't know how many of these boxes there are and if you live near me but I was told the problem should be fixed in the next few days. I was told to ring back at the weekend if it is not fixed by then.

It seems that the network bandwidth is suffering from high internet usage and it makes sense in the evening as people are coming home from work and using the internet.

Regards,
Iain.

[Graham M]

Im in BH14 and ive found my broadband SPEED has been up and down a bit today, i dont think its dropped totally since noone has timed out on my IRC server.

[steve_smith]

Interesting to read this thread.

I'm in BH12 postcode. Recently got fed up with 5 months of total lack of action regarding packet loss and general upstream problems on my cable modem connection. Nobody treated the problem seriously, probably because it generally only affected upload. In fact, what made me decide to close the account was when I was more or less told that the quality of the connection I had was probably the best NTL could deliver. Quite ridiculous when for the first 12 months of being a customer, it worked perfectly with zero packet loss and good ping times. Some piece of equipment or cable had obviously degraded, or they had got greedy and shoved too many customers on to an overloaded network segment. I gave them enough information to suggest the problem was local to my street (since I know an NTL customer in the next road to us who had and still has no problems with their connection), but again I don't believe that was followed up.

What I did find out over the months of various NTL engineers calling to the house was that NTL's upstream is crap (I think that was more or less a quote) and that BH postcodes, and especially the particular segment of the network in which BH12 and some other BH postcodes lie has been plagued with problems.

Now on ADSL, which although on paper is slightly slower in the download department (512k as opposed to 750k), feels much faster and has thus far been 100% reliable. If I choose to, I can upgrade it to 1Mbit, but haven't felt the need yet.

Its very sad, because until May of this year, I was completely happy with NTL. I guess it goes to prove what people say about only being able to judge the true quality of a provider by the way they deal with a customers problem.

Can only advise those who are having problems in our area to consider switching to ADSL if you can get it. You might save yourselves 5 months of calling tech. support once or twice a week and paying for a service that doesn't work properly.

Steve.

[funkyhitman]

Crumbs. I'd love to switch to adsl but unfortunately I was told by BT that I would have to pay £75 to get my phone line connected! And the overall cost would be much higher than what NTL currently offer. I'm a student so when an NTL flier came through the door offering free connection and modem and £25 per month I was very happy. Of course like everything it is too good to be true. I really hope they do fix the problem in this area like the nice man on the phone said. But I have a bad feeling nothing is going to change. Oh well only time will tell!

Steve, you say you were on the phone to tech support constantly whilst you were with NTL, but did they ever say they would fix the problem?

Ah terrific, my connection has just dropped again whilst I've been writing this post! Ridiculous!! Gonna have to wait another 3 mins before I can send it.

Well, I wouldn't be surprised Steve, if the problem in this area is due to NTL being "greedy and shoved too many customers on to an overloaded network segment" because I lose my connection mostly when it is likely many people are returning home and logging on......and BAM it overloads until 10:30 when people start logging off and going to bed or whatever.

Well my connection is now back, godspeed everyone and I hope this problem is sorted!

Iain.

[steve_smith]

Crumbs. I'd love to switch to adsl but unfortunately I was told by BT that I would have to pay £75 to get my phone line connected!
If you already have a BT line box somewhere in your house, then they sometimes to the reconnection for free. We got ours reconnected for nothing. But I do take your point, it does initially cost more (paying activation fees, buying a modem/router).

Steve, you say you were on the phone to tech support constantly whilst you were with NTL, but did they ever say they would fix the problem?
Well no, not really. Most of the issues are supposed to be down to noise/interference on the network. This apparently can be down to a customer having a faulty set top box, or a bodged cable connection in their house (seems to be one of the problems with cable, one customer who tries to rewire their coax cable can cause problems for all the other customers in their area). However, they went over my area with a fine tooth comb and couldn't find anything wrong. My connecton was no better. The only time it worked perfectly in the last 5 months was when the engineer was sat two doors up the road playing in the green cabinet. However, they couldn't explain why that was, and to my knowledge didn't come back to try and work out why.

I really do hope they sort it out, because my limit on ADSL is 1Mbit (due to the distance from the exchange). In the future I guess the internet is going to demand more than 1Mbit (in the same way we used to think 56k was fast). NTL might be the only the provider in this area who can offer > 1Mbit. Seems they have a hell of a lot of hard work to do first though...

All the best,

Steve.

[Gooch]

Can't say I blame you Steve for switching over to ADSL. My connection is still up and down. I'm seriously thinking of doing the same. I've seen a fairly decent deal with PlusNet. 1mb, no cap, £29.99 a month.....Very tempting!

[timetraveller]

I've also been complaining of poor connections (BH8 area) both with the TV and BB. The TV channels are always disappearing on both my STBs and a reboot gets them up and running although I have now given up organising "My Favourites" as they are always lost and are so long winded to keep setting up continuously. However, the problem is made worse by the fact that I connct via STB and that means that when the TV goes down and the box needs rebooting the BB gets cut off and when the BB goes down if my son is in the middle of watching a footie match he makes me wait 'til half time.
The trouble in the Bournemouth area has been particularly bad for the last two weeks and sometimes a connection after 6pm will last 5 mins or so and then you might as well give up until 10.30 or so.
I have been on the 'phone to tech support and depending on who you get to speak to you might get three or four different answers to the same question.
I have to admit that I feel the support is generally getting better and if you persevere you might get a result.
After my last complaint I have an engineer calling on Monday and hopefully he will split my BB and TV services so I use a modem and that way when I next lose a connection, either TV or BB only one service will suffer.
Tony

ps. I did receive a 'phone call today at work from NTL saying that they were checking to see if my problems had been resolved as they had carried out repairs in the area and did I still need an engineer to call.
Full marks to them for that as if it had then my slot could have helped some other poor Joe to bee seen earlier. Sadly I had to reply in the negative so sorry if you are that poor Joe, you won't be bumped up this time.

[Plonking]

i'm in the BH12 area... and its been pretty lame for the past week or so.

up and down, back and forth, the connection has been very unstable. don't know what the deal is :dozey:

good to see so many bournemouth locals on this site ;) how about a mini-gathering next time the net dies for us? it won't be the same, but we could get our pcs together and have a lan, install ipb and chat on a mini-nthellworld? :D

P

[timetraveller]

Hi Plonking
Good idea, next time NTL goes down I'll send you an email. lol
You're right, it is good to see more BH NTLers on the site and without wanting to sound nasty it is also good to see that they have problems, it gives you a sense of cameraderie and also prevents you tearing your hair out
trying to solve a problem with your computer which isn't there. (Not very clear explanation but I hope you catch my drift).
ps. The picture isn't of me either.

[Plonking]

lol!

I've kinda got used to my connection being odd lately. It's werid becuase, once it goes slow, a simple power cycle on my modem will often get my connection back to dead quick again!

When this frist started to happen (I think it's all related to the problems they have in southampton) it would have been nice to be warned about it, but there you go! It took a phone call to tech support and their reading off a list of messed up areas before I realised there was essentially nothing I could do about the problems!

I'm finding that the connection totally dies every night around 11ish and doesn't come back til about 8 the next morning. I wonder what the chances are of demanding some of our money back, seeing as we haven't been getting internet access 24/7 ....... its more like 15/7 !

Anyways I agree its good others have the same trouble, as at least it means it's not my fault! :D

P

[funkyhitman]

Well on friday my connection was a lot better. It did not drop til 6:50pm and it came back on after about 2-3 mins and stayed on for aboout 20 mins each time and after about 10pm connection stayed on completely. I thought yay NTL are doing something! But then yesterday eve (saturday) it was much worse, back to how it used to be starting about 5:30pm and dropping every 5-10 mins blah blah.

It is just so infuriating. NTL told me to ring back if the problem still persists so I guess I will.

Plonking, you say that you think we are having these outages due to the ongoing Southampton issues...is this your theory or has NTL told you that it is likely?

Cheers,
Iain.

[Hunt0r]

i live in the BH6 area and the problem is just the same, what i hate is there has been a problem with southampton since april and nothing has been repaired and new customers have been allowed to sign up and create more problems http://www.ntl-isp.ntl.com/ServiceStatus/ god dont u just love NTL

[funkyhitman]

god dont u just love NTL :Yes: Yes it is crazy this Southampton issue has been going on for months...ahhh I just don't know what to do or say anymore.

[funkyhitman]

Posted by m0pey at http://forums.ntlhell.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=6039&st=0&p=68234&

'I phoned them today about 3 and they said that there was an engineer at the box at the time, he'd been there since 9:20 this morning. I'm hoping this means that it'll be fixed later today. It has been better over the last few hours compared to normally at this time of day.
Fingers crossed...'

[Hunt0r]

NTL are full of bs tho any bets no engineer went out at all :o

[funkyhitman]

:rofl:

[Ignition]

'I phoned them today about 3 and they said that there was an engineer at the box at the time, he'd been there since 9:20 this morning. I'm hoping this means that it'll be fixed later today. It has been better over the last few hours compared to normally at this time of day.
Fingers crossed...'

NTL are full of bs tho any bets no engineer went out at all :o

Really? Hrm so who were the two engineers who'd been working in that area all day who phoned me up to ask for help with a couple of things this afternoon? :confused:

By the way Southampton doesn't equal Poole, different networks.

[paulyoung666]

hi seasick and :welcome: to the site , any joy yet or are you still having problems :(

[funkyhitman]

Well that's cool that there have been engineers out today...however when I rang up yesterday evening they told me there wasn't a problem in the area, which is clearly untrue, and they arranged for an engineer to come out to my house for tomorrow morning (how that will help I don't know).

Incidentally I had to cancel the callout anyway...maybe that's a good thing cos if the problem is now fixed and the engineer couldn't find any problems tomorrow would they charge me for the callout?

Regards,
Iain.

[Gareth]

*sigh* You guys are lucky, in a way, cause although my broadband is as stable as an erm... very stable thing, I have to live in Swindon.

I lived for a few years in Bournemouth ...Boscombe (yikes!), just behind the BIC and then in Winton. I really liked Bournemouth a lot.

It's a shame that the majority of jobs there were toursim-related, otherwise I'd have loved to have stayed there. As it is, I'm stuck in Swindon, along with Melinda Messenger and Billie (Pip Squeek) Piper.

Oh yeah.... is there still a fish & chip shop in the high street in Winton? It was green on the outside, iirc. They used to do the best fish and chips I've ever had.... although this was back in 1997/8, so maybe it's gone now.

Anyway, erm.... hope your braodband problems are fixed soon ;)

[vwman]

don't think its here now ! but the BEST fishnchips is in Westborne Chez Fred !!

[bruiser]

wasn't some politic guy there or summit l8ly? lol

[funkyhitman]

Well as of yesterday my internet connection has been rock solid (touch wood) and I hope it will be continueing that way. It did not go down once in the evening yesterday and has not gone down today either. Yay for the engineers that were fixing it all day yesterday.

Is everyone elses connection ok now?

Regards,
Iain.

[Gooch]

Mine is never a 100% ok. I don't think a day goes by where I don't lose my connetion for a period of time be it minutes or hours. I've just had enough of calling NTL now.

I think before they start rolling out better download speeds in the BH area they should sort the existing problems. No point in having 2-3mb if it isn't consistent.

[steve_smith]

MI think before they start rolling out better download speeds in the BH area they should sort the existing problems. No point in having 2-3mb if it isn't consistent.
Agreed, I would certainly consider coming back from ADSL in the future to take advantage of these speed increases, but only if I knew my connection was going to work.

Steve.

[Gooch]

Hi Steve

So NTL finally drove you over the edge. I'm not far behind!

[Plonking]

Mine's been up and down again today. I'd like to change ISP but need the net pretty much every day to get research and send emails to various people for my uni work, so I may have to wait until the summer when my uni work is over to make the big switch..

At which point I'll be moving house so it won't even matter :p:

[funkyhitman]

Well this is interesting, how come only my connection seems to be fixed? I spose that's more a rhetorical question cos I doubt you can answer it. Just the way it goes I guess, perhaps its something to do with my location. I'm BH9 and others of you are BH12 etc. Would this make a difference, are we on different 'nodes' but using the same network cable? (a tech support guy mentioned that the 'node' was where the problem lies). I really don't know what I'm talking about, just trying to make sense of it all.

Cheers,
Iain.

[steve_smith]

So NTL finally drove you over the edge. I'm not far behind!It was the point in time when the woman I had been dealing with for a few months (yes, months) started to get more and more dismissive over the problem and ended up telling me that the service I had (5% to 40% packet loss) might well be the best NTL could offer... If I started dropping my monthly payment by 40% to match their packet loss, I doubt they would have been too pleased. But it seemed acceptable to them to offer that level of service to a paying customer.

This claim was made despite the fact my sister-in-law who lives in the very next street (probably less than 50 meters away in fact) is having no problems with her connection (other than the up-down-up-down-up-down nature of NTL broadband in the Bournemouth/Poole area). I even took my laptop round there and plugged it straight in to her set top box to test my hardware.

I also had another one of those "We'll call you back after an inexplicably long number of days to see if it's still broken" claim (which seems to be a standard fob off) from an engineer that never happened. When I rang up customer services to cancel (after being pushed from pilar to post), I was told that they wouldn't take notice of cancelation from me (despite the fact the money was coming out my bank account). So my fiance had to call them... after all the engineers we've had out and all the problems we've had, customer services asked why it was we were cancelling ;) Needless to say, she told them ...

Like I said, if NTL fix it, and the new speeds are coupled with a decent upload, then I would consider coming back. But somehow I doubt it will ever happen. The network in our area seems to be in a complete mess. Whether the original problem was caused by Nynex or Cable and Wireless is irrelevant. The current franchise holder is NTL, so NTL should be sorting it out.

I'm on Zen ADSL, only on 512k (although apparently I can get 1Mbit). For my £24.99 a month, I get a static IP address, no bandwidth caps and so far (touching wood) a 100% reliable connection with no packet loss. Just a shame I had to spend 100 quid on a new wireless router/modem.

Steve.

[funkyhitman]

Hi it's been 3 1/2 months since the last problem was fixed...but now it's back again.

Is anyone else in the bournemouth/poole area having intermittent connection problems? I have dropouts every few mins from morning to evening. The dropouts are pretty quick and last about 1-2 mins. They started yesterday morning (monday). I've read that there may be interuptions to the poole area in the service announcements but is Winton considered poole?

[Plonking]

hey all,

thought i would just add to this existing thread rather than start a new one :) my modem went to sleep for about an hour, but now seems to be awake now - tried rebooting it and so on, but couldn't get on the net at all :D anyone else in bournemouth/poole/southampton having trouble this morning?

P

[Azathoth]

Had very slow browsing and download speeds yesterday (Wednesday) till 9pm when things seemed to pick up a little. Does not seem to bad today although browsing is still a little slow. Anyway i'm off to check the ping times in WoW hope they are not red like yesterday.

[Plonking]

ahh ok, well things seem ok now, thanks for the info, it must just have been my CM, lol :D

PS: good luck with WoW, it's got slower for everyone lately :dozey:

[Graham M]

Seems to be a bit of trouble in this area, i get random disconnects from WoW, drops in my internet, my Router loses the IP etc etc. NTL swear its my end, I reckon its a network problem however.