Hello to one and all and my word am I glad to have found a group of suffering gamers, for a moment I wa fearing for my sanity.
I work in IT and basically know what I am talking about. I have tried EVERYTHING that can be done with my PC, down to changing the MTU size. I have been on the phone to NTL on no less than 7 occasions now over the last month and am getting sharper on the phone each time as they attempt to talk me through the usual "safe-boot" pants.
I KNOW that there is some form of signal degredation issue somewhere along the lines within Luton. But it is rather specific as I have a good friend using the same settup around the corner 'in Luton' who is not seeing a problem with Gaming latency at all. I argued with a 'gent' from some foreign shore for the best part of an hour about Webcache being a port 8080 work-around and not a solution. He basically told me that "NTL does not support gaming", suffice it to say, I went mental at him...he basically hung up on me in return. Bravo to him!!!
So the short of it is kids, the guy I just spoke to says that it IS up their their Technical SUpport Intranet as a problem with "Gaming in Luton". So you can all call of the hounds for the moment. However, keep the hounds ready as the 'again foriegn speaking gent' basically said that I have to "bear with NTL" while they resolve. He even mentioned a 'recabling program', but I could have mis-understood is thick-accent so apologies. I said to him "should I leave NTL?" (to test the water). He replied, if you think that you can get a better service elsewhere it is up to me, "so Yes then..." I replied (I bet he smiled
).
So, the short of it is. All the phone calls from all of us have paid off and they are finally starting to investigate the causes if they haven't identified them already. I very much doubt that it is throttelling as I play games from dawn til dusk on some days and have seen the problems all through the day('s). Maybe they have a nasty bottleneck on a local exchange but my gut feeling is either a routing of traffic problem of infrustuctural cabling problem. Lets prey for routing!! as that should just be some routing changes and then its fixed, but I bet it is far nastier and is a re-cabling job.
The guy on the phone said to give it a week and try again, he did say he would note it on my account and that the Faults department could be contacted about re-imbersment. James mate, this may be a better strategy of attack. If we all ring up the Faults department and complain about gaming asking for money compensation I garantee that someone will start to care when they realise that lots of people are demanding money back!! Obviously they wont give any back but the point is that their Fault Manager will chase up the Problem/Investigation team manager('s) to see what the eta's are and what cost implication may be occured. I think that this would be a wiser move that TS.
Take care all and hope to lining up in some distant battle-filed with some of you in the not too distant future....
Best regards,
Luke