[abailey152]

Originally Posted by baldy

I can't really comment on this as I have no idea what area of the country you are in. As I stated earlier some areas require substantial investment, you may be in one. Personally I would move to ADSL if it was causing me so much grief. Not much interest in TV myself as it's mostly repeated junk, the wife would probably want SKY though

Ah! If only.... I'm in an area which couldn't receive ADSL, but now the BT site says, yes you can have ADSL but probably not the faster one. I wouldn't like to go back to 128k (or whatever it is). Unfortunately, if I wanted to try it to see what speed I could get, I'd have to have a BT phone line fitted first which they could test. Catch 22 it seems.

Read most of it a while back as well as others and as I previously stated needs to be rewritten as clearly it is causing grief. I download well in excess of the CAP and have not been bothered, neither has anyone that I know. Its primary purpose is to use against the *very limited* number of *heavy* users. To be honest it was fine the way it was originally worded.

I'd still like to see a tiered system. Much more fair IMHO.

Do you loose connection every Tuesday?

Okay, perhaps not every time NTL does load balancing, but it does seem to happen after a notice has appeared on the Status page saying that load balancing has/is being carried out in my area. Maybe a co-incidence, but it has happened quite often.

As with most products and services there are people who are happy and people who are not. Forums like this (no disrespect intended) generally give the impression that everything is bad with ntl. Just like working at any support centre they only here the bad side. What some fail to realise is that there are many many satisfied customers, myself included, I just thought I should put some balance into this debate . Yes I have the odd issue now and then but nothing is perfect in life and I accept that.

When everything is working, it works well, if you get my meaning. The phone has been okay since it was installed. The TV is okay (apart from the EPG as you say), and the BB is quick. Problem is when something goes down, NTL are slow to respond, do not release information, and some of their CS agents leave a lot to be desired. I've telephoned CS for a fault, gone through the normal reboot etc., been told an engineer will call, then later find out their has been a global fault. Why don't the CS agents know about this. They should have this information at hand. Similarly, when my STB died, an engineer couldn't come for a week. A couple of days, yes, but a week is ridiculous. The email problems are another example of no information. And the story of virus attacks and spam is stretching the truth methinks.

If I had the problems abailey152 refers to and it affected my enjoyment so much I would not hesitate in looking elsewhere for service.

Where? I can't get a guaranteed high-speed ADSL connection, and no other cable companies are around my area. NTL has the monopoly. As I've said before on this site, I'm keeping my fingers crossed hoping that the BB over the electricity supply is a technology which works and is introduced into my area. Now that would be nice.

Just like to add that my primary reason for selecting an ISP is to provide access. Services such as mail, usenet are secondary. I don't use ntl mail simply because I have my own domains and manage them myself and use Sendmail etc. as mentioned by others. It's a personal thing Many others have different views and I respect that. Perhaps ntl should do what many other ISPs do and offer a bare bones service with no additional services at a lower cost, it may benefit many users.

I'm already moving my email across to a mailbox on my web site, to overcome the spam issue. But I don't think we should have to do this. Afterall, NTL's prices aren't bargain-basement now. Okay, I don't mind paying, but I want good service in return.