When it's on it's good, when it's down, it's...

[mollymowler]

Like everyone else on NTL Broadband, I was experiencing random and intermittent web browsing, sites not available, email not working, etc, etc, all day yesterday. The 'server status' update on NTL World's helpsupport page said the usual 'upgrade/maintenence work' was disrupting service, but Cambridge wasn't due to be hit until today.

So, I phoned India at 6pm yesterday evening. I was told there were no less than 180 callers in the queue (is that a lot, a little, I wonder?). Then all of a sudden a recorded message cut in and said there was a fault across the UK and engineers were working on it.

Why can't the phone messages and NTL homepage messages be kept up-to-date? Why do I have to pay 10p per minute, kept on the phone by some durham-speaking bloke (presumably NTL's way of attempting to be 'friendly') only to be told that it's not actually a problem with my modem/PC, etc -- when I knew it wasn't in the first place.

I can only say thank God that I never did away with my BT Home Highway ISDN line when I got NTL's broadband service, or I'd be right up the creek. It may only be 64k (or 128 if I use both channels) but it's a *"!$$ £ better than having NTL's service going down on a regular basis.

When NTL's 10meg service is working, it's great. When it's not...well, I'm sure you all know how I feel. And I won't even mention the news servers, that cut off literally every five or ten seconds.

Am I a contender for the BBC's 'grumpy old men' programme?

Thanks for letting me rant.

James

Ill be a grumpy old man and say this really should have been added to an existing thread and not a new one

[AbyssUnderground]

I have to agree with the author. Ive never heard of an ISP go down as many times as NTL has so far this year. My mother uses Wanadoo and she has had 1 outage in the whole 2 years she has had it, and even then it was a phone line fault sorted out by BT. Never once has it gone down like NTL has.

Last night I was trying to update my website. Thats not easy when half the time I click a link I get a "server cannot be found" message, and my server is in the next room! NTL need to get redundant DNS servers to stop this happening. What I cant understand is why its all the major sites that go down, google, bbc, ebay etc when all the other ones I try seem to work (this one for example ). Whats with that? Its as if NTL are turning off the DNS servers for all the popular sites just to annoy people. Its not on...

[Mick Fisher]

Originally Posted by AbyssUnderground

I have to agree with the author. Ive never heard of an ISP go down as many times as NTL has so far this year. My mother uses Wanadoo and she has had 1 outage in the whole 2 years she has had it, and even then it was a phone line fault sorted out by BT. Never once has it gone down like NTL has.

Last week I had outages most every day culminating in a 12 hour outage on Friday. Then yesterdays performance for most of the day.

So far today I have had 3 outages, 2 very minor, 1 for 2-3 hours.

It's getting so the "service" is unusable more than it is useable.

It's the worst I have known it in all the years (we are talking terrayon modem here) I have been with ntl, and it seems to be getting worse.

[dcclanuk]

to be honest, broadband medic came up when i turned my computer on to tell me there are probs on the ntl network and engineers are fixing it.... so i thought that was a good thing by NTL!

ps 100 posts

[poolking]

Just wondering why 10Mb users suddenly think they should get a better service than everyone else on the lower speeds? This affects everyone the same and is just as annoying.

[englishpaul]

I can think of 35 very good reasons why 10Mb users moan the loudest!

Service here has been awful for the past few weeks.

[DipsTheOne]

I upgraded to meg about a month or so now nothing but trouble with it so im going to moan at it I wish i stayed on 2meg if they dont buck up the 10meg i shall return to 2 meg therefore they be losin that extra tenner a month and

[MagicMan]

Just to add my bit and no doubt ****** some people off - I personally havent encountered any serious problems in the last 12 months. Sure, I've had the odd bit of downtime here and there (I'm talking 30 mins at the most). I have never had an issue with the news servers (except during peak times) where they can dip to 100Kb/s at times. All in all, I'm happy with the service.

I do think it helps that I live in an area that I would guess has lots of TV subscribers and not too many bb customers so I dont have to deal with oversubscribed UBR's etc...

I tend to get full bandwidth 95% of the time (I'm on 2mb/s).

***OMFG - that is just the definition of irony*** Literally two minutes after that post, I got kicked of the net, my modem went ballistic trying to sync and its only just come back on.

BAD BAD NTL - I swear somebody was watching my type and did it on purpose!!!!