What happened to the speed ?

Originally Posted by jeffcrouch

in eastwood - same here - its like being on dial up.

Nottingham has been a biatch all day yesterday, it was as slow as a slow thing on a slow day, there was nothing on the maintenance page

[goblin]

Originally Posted by Imme

Hi, Goblin. I hope you get some resolution soon.

Thanks Imme

I went through this a few weeks ago and the "scheduled" outage/downgrade was never pre-announced, and it lasted about a week.

Ok, you can stop with the cheery news now

It was supposed to be over a period of 24 hours. That was fun, and made meeting my deadlines a real treat.

I would say I can imagine. But I can now see\feel the same thing. The really frustrating thing is that there's nobody to talk too. You phone customer services, they say call Tech Support, you call Tech Support and the most they can give anyone is "there is a problem in your area". Like I didn't know that already!?

I can't help thinking that in the day and age when everyone from the postman to the milkman are running around with handheld computers, that it would be THAT difficult to issue the same things to an NTL Engineer in order to update those that play around with the NTL Service page. Unless of course those that run NTL aren't too impressed with their own network integrity.

As for "tech support": Yesterday we called about someting and found that they do not even know what an ethernet cable is. I am not making this up.

No, I believe you.

They also provide our telephone service but can't find us in their system using the very number they provide. They're very intelligent and useful people.

I reserve judgement. I'm not seeing it for some reason. Heck, I can't even make myself understood by them. I once spoke to a guy over in india that sounded like he came from Birmingham. He could understand what I was saying, the rest of them... well let's just say neither of us understand what the other is saying. The line quality calling Tech Support is still abysmal. It took me 3 goes at trying to communicate my postcode to them over the stattic present on the line, in the end I thought "ahh ha! Phonetic alphabet... never fails... only to be asked; what is lima, november five (L, N, 5)". I hung up, counted to 20 then redialed, only to get what sounded like the same woman

Jeff, NTL makes me ratty too.

"ratty, .... Ratty!" I'd say more like suicidal. Calling NTL is now on a par with calling the likes of Dell or Microsoft. People generally are happy to avoid stressful situations. Unfortunately, NTL seem intend on increasing the stress in our daily lives with what they now pass off as a "Technical Support" helpdesk or a service for that matter. Still one would hope, things can only get better.

Edit, during typing the above, I've had a "speed test" running in the background, it just finnished as I pressed the "post" button.

----
Fri, 31 Mar 2006 08:13:10 GMT

1st 512K took 157328 ms = 3.3 KB/sec, approx 27 Kbps, 0.03 Mbps
2nd 512K took 312531 ms = 1.6 KB/sec, approx 13 Kbps, 0.01 Mbps
3rd 512K took 112156 ms = 4.6 KB/sec, approx 38 Kbps, 0.04 Mbps
4th 512K took 52125 ms = 9.8 KB/sec, approx 81 Kbps, 0.08 Mbps

Overall Average Speed = approx 40 Kbps, 0.04 Mbps
----

I was watching the file download for a while. I quickly drew the conclusion that it would have been quicker for me to get a taxi, visit the site I was downloading from, get them to burn the file to cdr then come back and put it on my computer.

---------- Post added at 10:05 ---------- Previous post was at 09:52 ----------

Originally Posted by Nidge

Nottingham has been a biatch all day yesterday, it was as slow as a slow thing on a slow day, there was nothing on the maintenance page

Has it improved at all ?

[Siuko]

I think this might be related to the nottingham issues....

My problems started tuesday night once I got home and logged on - about 4pm

I knew they were doing some upgrades / maintenance in the derby area (close to nottingham) early morning tuesday and also on thursday.

I noticed that my ip address has changed from an 81.* address to an 82.* address.

Since that time ( and its still doing it now) my connection drops randomly... I checked my router to see how often it did this and it seems fairly random here are some of the times between drops.

80 mins, 6 mins, 5.30mins,9.50mins,5.10 mins.

It only ever seems to drop the connection if something is happening on it. It was up all night when no bandwdith up or down was going through.

Now I'm back on it again and its randomly dropping every so often.

When it drops the send and recieve lights on the NTL 250 cable modem (that was installed about 2 months ago btw) stop flashing but the sync light stays on. Approx 20-30 seconds later it all comes back to life. The drop makes me lose connection to WoW, irc, teamspeak etc most of the time so it is getting very irratating.

Phoned Tech Support who are sending an engineer out saturday to have a look. Seems a wierd coincidence that others are having this sort of issue and that it never did this on the 81.* address.

Anyone shed any light?

[goblin]

I thought I would give an upate to my situation. I called NTL Tech Support again at approximately 1300 and briefly spoke to a guy who not only understood me, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. Unfortunately, in order for tech support to test my connection required the removal of my router. Something I couldn't do due to limited mobility. So ended the call there.

1930 approximately I phoned tech support again with a friend on-hand to do the running around for me. Again I was lucky I got through to someone who seemed to know what he was doing. He requested that I might have problems with p2p due to my lack of speed, though these were unfounded as I don't use that particular software. He stepped my speed up after downloading a file from the "test my speed" page at ntl and then found that when upgraded to 10mb my speed dropped. So from this he deduced that it was my Motorolla Surfboard SB-4100 modem that was at fault and as such would require an engineer to visit me on Monday in order to rectify the problem. I suspect that this may require a new modem but what I can't understand is why the surfboard modem didn't seem to have a problem untill NTL started doing whatever they started doing with the network on Thursday morning!? Up untill that day it was possible to download at a consistant 1200kbps for however long a download took. So it remains to be seen as to what is infact the cause.

Can anyone offer an explanation? Is it feasible that its the modem causing the problem?

[goblin]

Further update. Engineer failed to show on Monday, I got a call around 1530 to say so from a lady at an NTL call center. Another appointment arranged for Tuesday PM.

Tuesday AM my speed is abysmal I'm surfing at 6.2 B\s s....... l ....... o.....w..... l ..... y.... life in the fast lane huh? Anyway, PM arrives eventually and a knock at the door signals the engineers arrival. He takes one look at the modem says "hmm, that one doesn't support above 6MB" (it came as a shock, as I recall the instructions saying 10MB. Not only that it had been running at 12000kbps for about 3 months). Anyway, he nips out to the van comes back with this tiny box, pulls out a smaller blue box. Installs it, sent a text message to who knows where (begin awkward silence) 10 minutes later and I have 10MB again, hooray!

Performed a speedtest and it comes back with 9.5MB which is "quite good" apparantly, seeing as the engineer "enjoys" (tolerates more like) about 8MB himself. Fast forward to 000hrs and I begin my gaming session. Ping is a little bit high but stable right upto 0300 and then Bang ! My speed drops, up goes my ping and I find that I am on 6MB after a speedtest ... I cancel out of my game and start my browser. Speed to connect to Google.com 6.6kb ... connection to Usenet the same, connection with RealPlayer and VLC Media Player to www.di.fm so bad I can't connect (my neighbours were probably pleased alas I'm certainly not). By 0540 I'm getting tired so decide to opt for bed and the slow surfing its getting to me. So I start my downloads and notice I am downloading at a pawltry 4MB, which after a couple of minutes rose to 8MB and then finally about 10 minutes later 10MB before dropping again.

So what happens between 0300 and 0600 at NTL ? As I would like to actually be able to use my connection.