For many, many weeks I've been seeing frequent internet disconnections and timeouts here near Luton. Recently I've been using ping plotter (
www.pingplotter.com) to gather evidence about the problem in preparation for a battle with NTL. This showed I was getting 100% packet loss several times an hour throughout the day. Typically the breaks would be around a minute long while the longest recorded over a couple of weeks testing was 13 minutes. When ping plotter detected packet loss I would also lose all internet connectivity, so it wasn't just a case of the low-priority ICMP traffic getting dropped. The only time that was relatively free from packet loss was between midnight and six or seven in the morning, so it looks as though it was related to the load on the network. Ping plotter also reported numerous route changes during the time I was using it.
However, for the last 48 hours or so the problem has disappeared - ping plotter shows almost no packet loss at all, there have been no more route changes recorded and I haven't had any connection timeouts either.
In the early days of the problem I called CS several times and had the usual conversations about rebooting PC and modem, checking for viruses and spyware, etc, etc, etc, (none of which made any difference).
In the light of this I have a couple of questions for NTL:-
First, why not be more up-front with your customers about problems on the network? It's bad enough having to put up with an unreliable internet service, but it's far worse if the customer has to spend hours investigating and experimenting in order to eliminate any fault in his own equipment. A few more honest entries on the status pages would allow customers to see where they might be being affected by a problem on the NTL network.
So, if users in the xyz area are suffering poor performance because a node needs to be upgraded or because there's an unresolved fault, you should be proactively telling us all about it.
Second, what tools does NTL use to monitor its network and do they go as far as monitoring the kit in the local distribution cabinet in the street at port level, or is it only the main backbone that's monitored? Presumably NTL has the option to proactively look for evidence of developing intermittent faults on its network before they become too obvious to the customer? If that's the case why is it almost always a struggle to 'prove' to NTL that a problem is caused by their network and not the customer's equipment?
Mike
(Very happy with NTL when it all works, but unhappy with the way they handle faults)
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