I've been browsing throught this thread. I discovered this site today. I have been seriously thinking about getting shot of NTL. Despite the complete lack of service at TalkTalk, I have got it for my Mother-in-Law and Sister-in-Law. SIL's connection was fraught, involved long conversations with their rubbish CS, eventually they decided that the disk sent out with the Speedtouch 300 modem had a wrong driver version, so we connected up with dial-up, went to Speedtouch site, downloaded a later version (which itself was dated 2003 -- go figure) installed, and hey presto it sprang to life.
MIL was sent the Sagem 800 and that worked first time. I set her computer up to dual-boot Windows and Linux (
PCLinuxOS) and they both work. You can add scripts to Linux so I wrote one to detect dropped connections and reconnect. Nice.
The e-mail was useless. Wouldn't accept password via Thunderbird, occasionally did from webmail, often didn't. So I got a friend to send me a Googlemail invitation, and then I invited both of them. It's great, no more Thunderbird / Outlook Express etc for us any more!
So yes, TalkTalk is awful, but for me I can work around it.
NTL's cable broadband is more reliable, but does go down from time to time. And it's SO expensive. Just as I expected prices to tumble following TalkTalk's announcement, NTL rates just go inexoriably upwards. I've had enough paying for Sports and Movies, I only watched the Arsenal games anyway, and I'll just have to see the highlights on MOTD. My wife hardly watches the films, so that's gotta go. All we really need is another Freeview box to feed our Video/DVD Recorder.
But now we're talking about £17.99 for Broadband, £11.00 for phone, plus calls. Against TalkTalk's £20.99 for Broadband, phone plus free calls, it just doesn't stack up.
Some people in this thread talked about NTL's low profit margins, how can they supply phone and internet service if we all get lower prices? I suspect that much of their expenditure is on infrastructure. Once the cables are in place, I cannot see the provision of what is mainly an automated, non labour-intensive service, expensive to run. Put it this way, they'd be better off charging me £21 a month to match TalkTalk than me withdrawing my custom. The wires are there anyway, it's £21 they'll either get or not.
Anyway, this thread has given me food for thought, so I reckon I'll be after them for a deal in the next few days. Otherwise, I'm off as soon as it can be organised.