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Originally Posted by orangebird
That's your experience of it. There are plenty of people on here who could claim to be have had a trouble free internet service from ntl. Does that make them liars?
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Personally my only issue with NTL is that the communication between them and their customer base sucks. As far as the technical service goes, it's fine!
Transparent content caches are used for a number of technical reasons and you'll find a large majority of ISPs will use them, whether they admit to it or not. Layer 4 switches (or layer 7 for the advanced stuff) are the norm nowadays in enterprise - even the edge switches we deploy at work support some basic L4 functionality.
For those of you who have never designed and administered a network for use by a large number of people, it is difficult to appreciate how difficult this actually is. I work as a network architect for a university and one of our more recent projects to roll out 100Mbit ethernet to every student room in every hall of residence (just over 4700 rooms) certainly enlightened me as to the issues ISPs face.
So in short, give NTL a break. Yes their helpdesk is generally a pain in the butt, but many users have the technical awareness of a wet fish (obviously not us forum residents though!). Given the size of their user base and the issues faced in deploying UBRs and a decent, fast routed network that operates over a wide area, I think they do a technically sound job.
With NTL I just plugged my laptop in, ran their CD through (before I found out there is another method of registering), registered, unplugged the laptop, waited 20 minutes then plugged the firewall in. Job done. Ethernet and DHCP is definitely the way forward - none of this naff PPPoA (or PPPoE) to configure, no user names, no passwords, just plug and go.
Compare NTL to the issues that made me switch to them. My phone line is on old aluminium cabling as it was installed in the early 80's. Aluminium -> Copper joints corrode to hell and back, which caused me intermittent faults on ADSL. BT's response was always "no fault found" despite me sending them the logs off my firewall that clearly showed "ADSL sync loss". To this day, they still maintain that there is no problem with my line and still try to charge me £50 for the privilege of telling me so.
- Andy