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Are you sure about that mate... I've read people using Teryon, 3Com, Motorola etc. modems?!
Cheers,
Suman
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Those are long standing customers who have had their cable modems for years. When the first services came out, you had to purchase your own modem (like you do on DSL). This isn't the case anymore, and has been for some time - I think yuo use to get a discount if you had your own modem, but not any more. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they don't allow you to hook up your own modem to the network full stop, unless you were one of the 'legacy' customers who had to buy their own modems.
I wouldn't touch ntl with a 20ft bargepole. My 'experience' with them was nothing short of ghastly - the billing was inept and you spent ages on hold to speak to a CSR - mind you, back then it was free to call, but the wait times were long - so much so, that on one occasion I could predict what advert for their products was going to come on next - sad I know, but it gives you an indication of how long you had to wait; you could go "ah, here comes the one for ntl's football tv packages'. Again, for the bloody umpteenth time.
The other main killers for me, apart from the long waits to customer service (and shyte on hold music) and inept billing, were the fact that the email went down pretty much every day and I remember at one point, email was taking ages to get delivered and I always got authentication errors on a daily basis, and webmail was just as bad as it relied on the same backend servers which held the mail, and had problems. Result - lots of premature greyed hair and aggro. Plus lots of "have you got my email" questions.
The other was the fact that they had the forced proxy servers, which not only were a pain in the butt as it caused no end of problems with websites. Some wouldn't recognise your proper IP and refuse you access (rapidshare is an example of this - they think you've downloaded too much and ban you from their free service).
It broke streaming media too - causing it to become hit and miss. Some sites wouldn't work at all, whilst others were very intermittent. An example of this was when Radio 1 had the clips of the top 40 singles you could listen to, only about half of them would load. Others would time out with errors. Same with the BBC news site.
And to top it all off - when the proxies broke down (which they often did), you'd have to do the legendary 'proxy dance' - i.e. fiddle with the settings in IE, choose a ntl proxy from a list of many, whack it in and hope it wasn't down for maintainence, or simply bust or overloaded. Ah, bad times, bad times.
As you can probably imagine, I ditched them at the earliest possibilty for proxy free browsing with Pipex, whom I've been with for nearly 2/3 years now (in fact I think our "anniversary" is coming up soon
). I've been happy with their QoS, but their CS leaves quite a bit to be desired. Although, admittedly I have to rarely contact them, if ever. So that's good thing I guess.
With regards,
One of ntl's many exes (yeah, ex customers that is
).