To be honest I am not worried whether the suppor centre is in India the UK or Outer Mongolia. My issue is that the person I talked to clearly had no idea what the problem was.
She talked me doggedly through the script, refusing to listen to what the problem actually was. It took me a good few minutes to convince her that my modem didn't have a synch light and she was talking about a different model. The problem was that my cable modem was not getting its network address from the NTL network, this had been happening randomly on and off for about 3 days. And still I spent a good 40 mintutes rebooting my modem, PC and possibly kettle to try and get it to work.
It eventually did work, at which point I asked her if she had done anything at her end, at which point she helpfully talked me through the script. She may have done something at her end I have no idea, and if she did and that has sorted the problem then it's all well and good.
The issue I have is that I have no confidence in the technical ability of NTL's technical support. I am an IT Professional, I've worked in Support roles, Run a Support desk fixed anything you can think of from simple PC's to Wide Area Networks and am now writing applications for an international company. If someone of my ability cannot communicate technically with a tech support person, I don't hold out much hope.
NTL if you are going to employ tech support people for broadband, employ someone who has some understanding of how it all works. That when your modem wont initialise properly it's not going to be a problem with the PC. If your modem can't receive an IP address from the NTL network rebooting your PC isn't going to help.
At this moment in time I am connected and all is well, but have no idea how long that will last, I have been connected on and off since Wednesday. I don't know if what she did fixed the problem, or it just happened to reconnect while we were on the phone, and I dread having to call back if it goes off again.
I'd like to stress that I don't blame the poor girl on the end of the phone, it's not her fault. The issue is that NTL has employed a non technical person to fill a technical role. Following a script to try and fix a problem is only going to work some of the time, I would also suggest that the script isn't adeqaute.
I'm going to stop ranting now
I could go on for pages and pages.
Take care
John