[Ehm]

ok, so on Wedsday evening, at about 21:00 I noticed that the listen game server I was running for a few of my mates wasn't working, they couldn't connect to it. On further investigation it appeared that DNS also went down.

I rang the tech support number (around 22:00) and they said they've been having DNS issues and there was a local problem that could be attributed to the loss of service I was experiancing with the game server, and that there were people addressing the problem at that time and that it should be fixed by the following morning.

I checked the DNS resolution again that next morning, and it hadn't been solved - fine, it's taking them longer to fix it, so I went to college. When I got home I noticed that DNS lookups were still not working (timing out) using nslookup & any other apps, so I rang the technical support number again. This time I got patched through to their indian call centre, where they know nothing about networking, despite working for an ISP. They ran through the usual malarky of making sure that the nameservers were set up correctly, that I could ping an IP, restarting in safe mode (despite me saying all 4 of my computers on the network were having the same problem, and it all started happening at the same time - and me being on a router.) They didn't help and suggested that I do a system restore on all 4 computers and that it'd work. Needlesss to say I just hung up.

Friday after college I checked DNS lookups again, still no luck, so once again I rang up and showed that I'm not a dumbarse and they promtly put me through to "Tire 2" tech support (Do they meain 'tier' perhaps?), and this technical supporter couldn't solve the issues I was having, so he took my mobile # and said that he'd investigate and I would possibly get a call back about it.

Not being satisfied I decided to do some independant testing on my end - I knew I was connected to the i'net. I ran some tests, talked with some people on IRC and found out that although TCP/IP was working, UDP/IP packets were not coming in or out.

This prompted me to ring tech support once again, and this time I was direct. I told them that UDP wasn't working and the tech support guy responded with "What's UDP?" - I explained it a little and he put me on hold. 30 seconds later he came back to me and told me "I'm sorry sir, but NTL does not support UDP/IP, we only support TCP/IP". I was absolutely flabberghasted and asked if he was serious, "yes" was the reply. I was not convinced and asked to speak to his supervisor, who reiterated the fact they were now blocking all UDP traffic, since Weds evening (Wow, what a coincidence!!!!!111). When I asked for the reason this is what he replied with:
"As I'm sure you're aware, UDP packets try to find the fastest route through the network, and that takes up a lot of bandwidth. We analysed the network usage and found that UDP was taking a significant about of bandwidth and at peak times there were loads of UDP packets floating around. With the new upgrades to users' packages, we're now slightly shorter on bandwidth, and since we've made the change it's actually working in customer's favour."

I called him a liar and hung up, saying that I would report him to customer service and cancel my account... later that evening my dad, who is the bill payer, did report the issue to Customer Service (they've screwed us around with billing at the begining of the month too) and got given a reference number, and they said that they would look into the DNS issues.

At the moment, UDP packets are still not coming in or out for me, I cannot see any configuration errors anywhere, does anyone have any suggestions for how I might fix this other than harrassing NTL? (and if it's not fixed my the end of Monday boy are they going to know about it)