A quick update on my issues, in case anyone's bothered and to help me keep my sanity.
After getting home tonight and realising that my downloads were still only of dial-up proportions, I got on the phone to NTL's tech support again, and ended up speaking to a girl in India.
After running through countless inane tests, she put me on hold to go and speak to her supervisor. I kinda figured she might have been out of her depth when she asked me to read out the code printed underneath my modem - "Oh, you want the MAC address?" I asked, to which she replied that she already had my address but could I read out the long number printed underneath the modem
Anyway, after yet more tests, disabling of firewalls, adding and then changing of proxies, pinging, tracert-ing, downloading from
this site, rebooting of modem, etc... etc... etc... she claimed to have miraculously found what the error was. When I asked her to enlighten me, she said that "my cable modem was configured on the
wrong server" but that she'd change it over for me. When I asked what she meant by the 'wrong server' she was unable to explain it... apparently it's something I'd not understand
So, she said her change was going to take 2-3 hours to update... and so far nothing's changed *sigh*
However, I did get a call reference for this call, so hopefully when I call them tomorrow, I'll be able to avoid 45 mins of wasting everyone's time, and can cut straight to the chase.
If anyone knows a way of getting through to NTL's 2nd-line support people, please let me know... or do they all clock off at 5, and route their phones to Bangalore?