What to do?

[Gooch]

Hi I used to be a member of the old NTLHell forum before it was closed down and this is my first post on Cable Forum.

Where I've had a more or less trouble free service for the last couple of years, the last 3-4 weeks with NTL broadband have been terrible. My connection has been intermittent to say the least. Some days I go hours without any service, sometimes its up for 5 minutes then down for 5 minutes. Like I say this has been going on for the last 3-4 weeks.

I've phoned NTL twice and they admit their has been a fault in the BH12 (Poole) area. But they couldn't actually give me any lead time of when the fault will be rectified or what the fault is. Also they couldn't immediately look at my particular problem unless I had no service over a 24hr period.

This is qute frustrating when your paying £25.00 a month for a 600k connection and only getting a service that is up and down like a yo-yo.

Has anyone else in this area experienced any problems recently?

Also I am a Computer Engineer/Network Administrator and without sounding big headed I am sure it is not a problem at my end i.e my PC setup. I have not changed anything with my setup.

At the moment I am seriously thinking of goingto ADSL as I am pulling my hair out and not getting any answers from NTL.

I'd better get this thread up before my connection dies again!

Please share your wisdom if you can?

<edit> your first post, to the forum

how do you connect, sacm or stb?

what operating system do you use?

which browser do you use to connect to the internet?

have you checked the ntl service status page?

http://www.ntl-isp.ntl.com/ServiceStatus/

- the southampton outage may be relevant to you?

[rockin_plumber]

I had the same problem (in the Salisbury area) which was ongoing for about 2 months.

They visit check your cables, check where your cable enters the building, check the point outside, and check the connection to the modem.
I had THREE engineers come to check this. (everytime it was the same old routine)

The third one said I needed a network engineer to do summit to the box up the road. Hey presto about a week later it was fixed


Luckliy I had managed to compile a list of the times the modem had dropped the connection.

Windows XP is quite easy for this.

Control Panel
Administrative tools
Event Viewer
Then select system

If you click type it will sort all the events.........
I listed all the ones with the red X

EG. X Error 22/06/2004 10:45:26 Dhcp NONE 1000

I figured out that most of them tallyed up with when I had no connection so I sent them a list with all the Dhcp errors / Times / Dates

I know they have modem statistics but they will try to give you a percentage of your monthly payment rather than the whole lot.

Anyway presented with the information I had they refunded 2 1/2 months rental in full

But good luck coz from experiance NTL Broadband is great....... until you get a problem, then its a nitemare getting it sorted

[rockin_plumber]

Originally Posted by homealone

have you checked the ntl service status page?

That was a classic too....................

Everytime I rang to say my connection was down I would check the service page with the trusty old dial-up. No problems in my area

They did insist on checking thenselves saying "well that page may not be up to date"...........

WHAT IS THE POINT OF IT THEN

[Gooch]

Thanks for the replies...


Homealone:

I connect using an NTL Broadband modem not a st top box. I am using WinXP Corp and use IE to browse. I have checked the NTL Status page frequently and have seen nothing about BH12. Whether Southampton has got anything to do with it I don't know although I would very much doubt it considering the distance.

Rockin_Plumber:

Thanks for your input, but unfortunately I can't even get NTL to send an Engineer out.

I phoned NTL yet again this morning and spoke to Tech Support. I was told they are aware of a faults (approx 4) in my area and they do not know when they will be sorted. Apparently some of the faults go back to Nov 03. To be fair I have only experienced severe problems in the last 4 weeks although NTL email has always at best been shoddy!

Tech support also tell me that if I manage to get my browser up at least once in a 24hr period they will not send an Engineer out. I have to have no service for full 24hrs to recieve Engineer support.

This anyway I suppose is irrelevant because Tech Support say they have tested my line and all is fine at my end. They admit the problem lies with them.

So where do we go from here then?

Maybe I can get some sort of compensation for the crap service I am recieving although I wold much rather have a working net connection.

Tech support put me through to customer services who tell me they have no
record of any of my calls so can not help with compensating me. They put me back to Tech support where I speak to quite a helpful chap who listens to my problem before ringing Customer Services himself and explaining the situation.

Nice customer services lady promises to call me back after talking to her Team Leader......Hopefully they will call soon.

Generally speaking the people I have spoken to at NTL have been extremely polite and have tried to help. But I fear that most of them don't really have that much technical ability and are also kept in the dark themselves most of the time.

I'm now seriously thinking of switching to ADSL as NTL can't give me any lead time on fixing the faults..Doh!

Sorry about the rant!!!

Blimey, that sounds really frustrating. I can't, personally, offer any solution, unfortunately. The only thing I can say is that, as with the recent problems in Leicester, it may be connected with the infrastructure upgrades that NTL are undertaking at the moment?

Hopefully someone from NTL will get back to you soon, with some more positive news, in the meantime it will probably be an idea for you to make a note of all your outages & calls to NTL (when, how long & who you spoke to) - & keep posting in here to let us know how you are getting on.

[rockin_plumber]

Originally Posted by homealone

........in the meantime it will probably be an idea for you to make a note of all your outages & calls to NTL (when, how long & who you spoke to)

The best advice by far

[Gooch]

Nice lady from NTL did call. I've go to say, credit to her I was expecting to have to call her back. She has refunded this months £25.00 as a good will gesture. I said thanks very much but I would rather have a working net connection. Thats obviously not her fault though.


So at least I get some of my dosh back for the crap service. Still seriously considering ADSL though. I'll try and grin and bear my intermittent service for a couple more weeks but thats it. If there is no change its hello Pipex, goodbye NTL!

[Chrysalis]

leics isnt 100% yet but for me mostly back to normal so unless they havent done the whole area yet which may well be the case as status is still red then your case is isolated, but as long as its red there isnt much you can do as officially the leics outage is still on.

[steve_smith]

Originally Posted by Gooch

I've phoned NTL twice and they admit their has been a fault in the BH12 (Poole) area. But they couldn't actually give me any lead time of when the fault will be rectified or what the fault is.

My experience of using the internet in the BH12 area yesterday was periods of very little problems, then no connection at all (100% packet loss for maybe 5 minutes), followed by periods of intermittment bad packet loss (20 or more packets out of every 100 lost). This seemed to cycle through out the day, and I wonder if it was because they were doing line testing or something?

I wasn't at home last week, but apparently every time my girlfriend went to use the PC she had to power cycle the cable modem to get an IP address.

Prior to this, since May I've noticed periods when there was no connection. At other times (all the time in fact) if I ping a site 100 times, somewhere between 3 and 10 of the packets are always lost. Before May it was fine (or at least I didn't notice anything wrong).

Apparently the problem is down to a lot of noise on the local network which NTL have to find the source(s) of.

I just hope they sort it out soon. Very shoddy that they can't tell you when it will be fixed, but are quite happy to keep taking everyone's subscription money in the meantime. Also, I was told the Southampton problem had no effect on our area. So I don't know why problems in other areas get listed on the NTL status page, but not our problem in Poole

Where I am, ADSL is not really an option unless you are happy with 512k download, and whatever BT decide you can have for upload (it's meant to be 256k, but the further you are from the exchange, the lower that figure can drop).

Steve.

[Gooch]

Steve

Your symptoms are exactly the same as mine.

I think from reading one of your other posts you are in the same boat as me. ADSL wan't available in my area a couple of years ago when I wanted Broadband. So I opted for NTL. ADSL is now available where I am although I expect I am on the outer boundary of the Parkstone exchange so I might have upload probs like you. At the moment though I'm very close to binning NTL all together.

[steve_smith]

Originally Posted by Gooch

ADSL is now available where I am although I expect I am on the outer boundary of the Parkstone exchange so I might have upload probs like you. At the moment though I'm very close to binning NTL all together.

We binned the phone service and got our BT line reinstalled, in case we needed to get ADSL. However, the BT guy who came out to install the line said we were at the edge of the operating limit of ADSL. Since I was thinking of upgrading my NTL to 1Mbit, the fact BT can only offer 512K to our address put me off.

I truely think that if they are now finally working to solve these problems, then we should eventually end up with a service, for me at least, that works a lot better than ADSL can.

Steve.

[Gooch]

My net connection was up all yesterday evening and still going strong this morning.....Yippeeee......Even NTL Email worked...well sort of....most of the time.....Don't speak to soon!