Well Done NTL
 

I know many of us, including me have made many threads about how poor the service is from NTL, especially on the 10Mbps service, but last month NTL promiced to improve my area and i'm proud to say they have.

For the last week now i've been getting steady speeds of around 1.20MB/s from good servers such as Microsoft, so thank you NTL for keeping to your promice. I get 8Mbps on speed tests even at peek times.

I'm not going to complain about speeds anymore, and i'll be a very happy NTL customer just as long as it stays like this.

Also, for some reason, there are about 17-18 of those green boxes on my street now, on the other streets there are only 1 or 2, oh well, i'm happy.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Improved service to what they should have been anyway by the look of things... forgive my cynicism but I don't see why their being applauded for such 'improvements' keeping to promises.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

I'm only doing this because there are so many negative threads, i thought it would be nice to make this thread since they've finally done something right for once.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

I paid £1.20 to call their 0871 number to speak to a Bombay lad that I could not understand. This was the price that I had to pay to report a fault.

18 green boxes :Yikes:

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Yeah, i counted 15 at the beginning of the road, halfway through there is another 1, then you get to the end of the road there is another one, then walk a couple of steps round the corner and there are another 3.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Hi
i to are a happy bunny[after many troubles] speeds have been good for some time now :).

keep it up NTL :)

Re: Well Done NTL
 

I think it says a lot about NTL's current level of service when a customer goes to the trouble of 'applauding' thier good performance over the space of 7 days....

Re: Well Done NTL
 

re well done ntl.
i have recently had a problem with set top box freezing and broadband connection dropping out.advised customer services,engineer visited,installed
new stb,problem sorted,many thanks to all concerned for excellent service.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

I've been having nothing but problems with them since October 2005, so it's a nice change to be recieving a good service for once.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

I agree with tonecold, why should NTL receive praise for providing what you pay for, when a great many customers are left in the cold. I am currently getting speeds of 0.3mb/s when I pay for 4. Google pings at 300ms. I installed a satellite system at a company recently. Even this system can manage 400ms on average.

Congrats NTL, you can only just outperform a connection which has a 60,000 km round trip!

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Well NTL are performing tonight. It's there normal level of crap evening speeds. Indeed WELL DONE NTL for messing up another nights gaming fun.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Can't say I have any complaints about ntl; the TV always works and the broadband always goes at the speed we pay for, although something does seem to be up tonight.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

My speed is disgusting. On the first day of install and a few days after it was fine, not it's slow and no way is it connecting at 10mb. I do random tests on adsl reports and similar sites and it always says your connection is low for the speed I chose.

Thing is, what can I do about it other than keep complaining?

Re: Well Done NTL
 

My speed is bloomin amazing!!

1208kB/s :D

3 yrs of very good performance apart from a few blips.

NTL are highly recommended here :)

---------- Post added at 23:28 ---------- Previous post was at 23:27 ----------

Threaten to cancel all NTL services if you arent happy?

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Indeed I agree with the people that have stated what it says for NTL on the whole when you applaud them for doing what they should be doing in the first place anyway. It's like applauding your job for paying your wages at the end of the week/month.

To the original poster, that's good to hear for you (not meaning that sarcastically, I'm being genuine in saying that) but I do wish to set the challenge that you'll keep getting such a good service over a period of time. I've never gotten a good service over any length of time without some sort of fault or something performing generally worse than we're paying for. Also it seems that I'm not in the minority in saying that by far.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Yes I notice in the first post the phrase "i'll be a very happy NTL customer just as long as it stays like this." I wouldnt hold my breath TBH.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

kinda like applauding the retarded kid for doing his homework i'd say.. it happens despite the fact that everyone else does it without a thought.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

I have been on BB with NTL since 1999, on the odd occasion I have had no access and slow browsing at the odd time, NTL strive to do their best by their customers and on the whole 99+% of them are happy.

As said elsewhere if your not happy there are many ISP's out there willing to take your money its not as if you have to stay with NTL.


If you have slow browsing try using a proxy's (or changing the one you use) and as for slow downloads, well they do say "UP TO" which gives them a wide scope.

Over all I'm more than happy with the service NTL provides. :tu:

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Ive been with ntl for nearly 3 years (Had a six month break due to being in a non ntl area), I have never, ever, had an issue with my service, (Getting it working to start with is a different matter, but hey), I'm currently on 4meg, the downloads are swift, pings are good, and the upload isnt bad either.

So, as long as it is on, im happy with ntl :)

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Well, i'm sorry to everyone else who isn't getting the service they should, but just keep complaing like i did, they will do something about it.

I'm still getting good speeds, since i've been getting this better service from them, everytime i've been home there has been atleast 1 ntl van with a guy doing something to those green boxes, so they must be doing something right?

Still getting 9Mbps even now @ 8pm when it should be sluggish.

I had always had a good service as i've said many times till October 2005, when it went sluggish and really poor, but its still going good ... :)

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Speed has always been excellent here along with the service - apart from a strange 15 minute outage of both TV and broadband this afternoon I don't remember having any faults, speed problems or loss of service at all. Right now I'm downloading a Knoppix ISO file at 480KB/s, pretty decent for 4mb at peak time.

Unfortunately when I have needed to call customer service it's been a bit more mixed really - sometimes great, other times they've been useless.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Speed in my area (Portsmouth/Cosham) is okay off-peak but gets very slow during the day and especially in the evening.

How do you go about reporting this to NTL? It's not really a fault as such, just an indication they need more capacity in a certain area.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Good luck reporting it, they're incompetent enough when it's a genuine fault!

It's great for the odd person having a fantastic service but not so great for the hordes of others who are getting a shoddy service repeatedly.

Whoever said 99+% of NTL customers are happy needs to wake up and get their eyes tested while they're at it. Do you work for NTL by any chance?

Re: Well Done NTL
 

My eye sight is fine mate, and work for NTL? nah got better things to do with my time during the day, I got a real job.

If you take NTL's customer base as a total and then the percentage of customers who experience continuous problems, or ongoing probs, it will be a very small amount. You cant keep all of the people happy all of the time :disturbd:

Nothing stoping people moving to other providers if their not happy with the service, if NTL dont give you what you pay for then there in breech of contract and you can move.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

NTL do have issues, no doubt, but they are still far better than ADSL providers.

BTs pricing of 8MB ADSL makes it unworkable. An ISP needs to oversubscribe by 150 to 1 just to cover the cost of the BT pipes. There was a web site somewhere that priced it all up but I forget it now... something.org.uk.

My main advice is stay away from NTLs mail servers (use gmail for pop3) and if possible get a router with traffic shaping, like a pfsense box. NTL seem to use stupidly long queues on their modems which really screws P2P and the like up.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

I agree with alferret, ntl:telewest have a customer base of about 7 MILLION like any big business you are going to get a few bad experiences, so where you get your "hordes" from I do not know:confused:

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Well it isn't my fault that you're having issues, but as i said, i was having a sh*t service since October 2005, until i finally had enough and complaied whenever i had time during the month and something has finally been done about it.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

http://www.smileyhut.com/happy/coolthumb.gif Very helpful NTL person has organised an engineer for a day that suits me as the BB keeps cutting out. No waiting to be put through either (caught me out a bit) :rofl: and did not seem scripted and allowed for the fact I am not the named account holder (actually allowed the password system rather than getting fixated). http://www.smileyhut.com/thumb/thmbup.gif NTL (so far anyway).

And all this on a Sunday.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

To be honest, I really do think NTL is generally better than most ADSL providers, considering they offer an unlimited service.

Sure, the likes of Demon and Zen are more reliable, but they don't garantee you a better speed and both are limited.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

BT's pricing of 8Mbit ADSL is no different per Mbit/s from their pricing of 2Mbit, ISPs undercharging is the issue.

I note that for your 8Mbit experiences you chose Ace and Evolution, Evolution charged too little and folded, Ace charged too little and their supplier was forced to implement traffic shaping to try and control the load, a load coming mostly from people who wanted to download as much as possible for as little as possible and migrated from Evo to Ace. Can't help but think if you'd stumped up a bit more on a higher quality ISP you'd have seen better results from ADSL. Pay peanuts...

ntl's modems don't queue a thing, even if they did a router on your side would do nothing to affect the queues, would it? The modems are strictly FIFO and work as fast as they can, this is however controlled by congestion on the local network, if the modem can't get a slot in time and the buffer is filled the traffic is dumped.

Re: Well Done NTL
 

Not so. BT used to charge a fixed amount for a 2Mb line with a fixed contention ratio (50:1 for home users). For 8Mb, they charge about 1.5M pounds per year for a 622Mb virtual pipe, and you can throw as many users as you like on it.

So, instead of fixing the contention ratio themselves, which when moving from 2Mb to 8Mb would mean they needed 4x as much capacity to maintain things, they just made ISPs deal with it.

This FIFO is the queue I'm talking about. Outgoing packets are delayed by having to wait in the FIFO.

A router can prevent this by only sending as many packets out per second as the modem can send. By having a constant, fixed speed stream of packets the modem never buffers them, it is always able to send strait away.

The advantage is that ping times are maintained. With pfsense, I can saturate 90% of my upstream bandwidth and still have a ping time of 30ms. Normally, anything over 20% of my upstream drops ping times instantly, and results in lost packets.