[altafd]

Greetings to all Forumers,

I will be moving to the Cheshunt area hopefull soon and the house has a pre-existing non used NTL connection. I am seriously considering activating the connection again with Broadband, phone and TV. I have been a happy user of traditional ADSL on a 2Mb connection but the combined price from NTL looks appealing - now whether it is really worth it!

So for NTL, I am contemplating getting a 4Mb connection - for that I wanted to get some help on (already tried the SEARCH function) on:

- What type of cable modem (e.g. 250 or 120...) should I be requesting from NTL prior to the installation?
- Also will I be able to protect the modem with a password so as other people (e.g. stealing of MAC address) or even NTL support cannot get access to the modem (to eventually get access to my computer or home network)?
- Should I be asking the engineer to check the signal level for Broadband and TV as the existing cabling may be old?
- Are we forced to use NTL proxy or can we surf directly?
- Are we aware that NTL applies filtering to certain type of IP traffic (based on port number ...)?
- Is a contention ratio of 20:1 good for cable modem?
- NTL told me that the cable distance does not have an effect on the speed and I should be getting pure 4 Mb connection - any views on this statement?

Thanks for assisting me and may be others on this decisioning process.

Cheers
Taffy