Internet Disconnects after a few hours usuage

[dvk01]

I am getting drop outs and disconnections continually today

I had this problem several months ago & the fault was traced to a conection somewhere in one of the street boxes

I have to reboot teh cable modem every 10 or 15 minutes to stay connected

I attmpted to speak to the engineers but got diverted to India where the person at the other end won't book an engineer or dp anything without lots of private information which I will not give

He wants to know all sorts of information that I know I have never put down on my account and he wanted my email address password which I flatly refuse to give

How do we get problems fixed then if we haven't given secret information and I won't give out my email password to anyone and shouldn't have to
Who do I complain to in NTL about this invasion of privacy and blatent security risk

Surely my account number and modem mac number is enough to prove that I have an NTL account and that I am in front of the modem

If anyone can help me I am in the IG10 postcode area

[DarkFX]

Originally Posted by dvk01

I am getting drop outs and disconnections continually today

I had this problem several months ago & the fault was traced to a conection somewhere in one of the street boxes

I have to reboot teh cable modem every 10 or 15 minutes to stay connected

I attmpted to speak to the engineers but got diverted to India where the person at the other end won't book an engineer or dp anything without lots of private information which I will not give

He wants to know all sorts of information that I know I have never put down on my account and he wanted my email address password which I flatly refuse to give

How do we get problems fixed then if we haven't given secret information and I won't give out my email password to anyone and shouldn't have to
Who do I complain to in NTL about this invasion of privacy and blatent security risk

Surely my account number and modem mac number is enough to prove that I have an NTL account and that I am in front of the modem

If anyone can help me I am in the IG10 postcode area

I'm in exactly the same situation as you.

Indian call centres = absolute crap (I should know, the company I work for is ALWAYS outsourcing over there). They seem completely ignorant that they just said "Well I just checked and there are no issues in your area" - Only to then say 5 minutes later after finding sod all wrong with my connection (at that time) and PC "oh.. I just checked and there is a fault in your area... since february 22nd".

I've never considered leaving NTL until now, outsourcing to India might be cheap, but you will get your customers a hell of a lot more irate when the "Technicians" don't know their arse from their elbow. UK call centres have brilliant technicians though...

PS - My connection dropped while typing this reply! But i'll call India and probably get told it's my non-existent P2P software that's causing it!

[mr-b]

On a positive note, my CM has not lost its IP address since being replaced a week ago.

However, as I mentioned before, I did have to ask to speak to a supervisor to get this done.
I also kept a diary record of all my previous calls to support and the outcomes of each. Armed with all this evidence, the supervisor really had no choice but to agree on all the ground that had been covered before and then replace the one item which had not been verified.

I can sympathise with previous posters' boatloads of issues - but in the end I don't think that you're realistically going to get them all solved - ntl has been publicly slammed on the media before for poor service and nothing's changed.

To avoid frustration, I'd advise just focusing on the very specific issues that are most important to you!

[dvk01]

My big gripe is not with the engineer when he comes but the appraoch of the Indian call centre
I resuse to divulge any email password and shouldn't have to

the whole idea of them saying taht only the account holder can report a fault is seriously flawed and the amount of nonsense to go through to prove you are the account holder is beyond belief

OK they would lkke you to be in front of the computer so surely the mac adress of the modem and my adress and phone number is enough

I haven't ever given them (to the best of my knowledge) any other secret info & will not do so

If I have then there should be some method on the web site to acccess that info & allow me to change it and as there isn't then they don't get that info from me

Call me paranoid if you want but I am a security specialist and I spend a lot of my time dealing with people who have had identities stolen & used on the net and most were stolen not from the computer but from giving info to call centres who don't have the required security measures in place to protect such info

Also I consider that the data protection act applies to all the info NTL hasd onme and to export it outside the EU without mu consent is a clear breach of that act and I will be writing to the MD of NTL warning him of the consequences of their actions


As it happens it was an area fault & not anything at my end as usual and corrected it self Or wa scorrected by NTL tech ( I found out the next day when I managed to ring one of the engineers I have have frequent dealings with )

[gazz]

I recently ordered NTL last month on the 25th, and every single day it's gone down at least 2 to 3 times a day. So i'm basically getting disconnected randomly everyday for no apparent reason. I have rang up and they blamed it on my Zonealarm firewall so me being a pc newbie i un-installed it thinking there might of been a glimer of hope it being fixed. Nope, none, infact i reinstalled XP just incase there's something blocking my network and guess what it still goes down at least 2 to 3 times a day. I use the run the "CMD" quite frequently to ping ntlworld.com and i sometimes get a reply but most i don't "Request timeout" Even now while i'm posting this my internet is very very slow and just disconnected about 5 minutes ago. I know my internet is 'UP' and working because the lights are always on but it's the amount of packetloss, varying from 25-100%. I recently got rid of BT because they wouldn't sort out my routing and the browsing was awfully slow, but it had only gone down about 4 times in the period of 3 years i'm now unfortunately on a year long contract with NTL, i just hope this madness is sorted soon.

[mr-b]

It looks like I spoke too soon - my ip address was gone again this morning.
Support wanted to swap out the cablemodem again, and I didn't have any other ideas, so this pm an engineer swapped my Ambit 200 for one of the new Ambit 250 vertical modems.

He was very helpful and said that if the issue happened again, then after being swapped twice, it almost certainly couldn't be a CM issue, which at least narrows things down a little more.

However we had a discussion about how the DHCP ip address allocation process works - and it turns out that the UBR supplies my ntl ip address, and that ntl record every single DHCP ip lease that is given out, and it might be useful to enquire about this on any future failures, since that could point towards a problem ...

[steve 'o']

Now i can't help you about your connection problems but if NTL are giving you the run around I would suggest a call to OFFCOM telling them of your troubles about unsatisfactory answers from NTL and their indian call centres. Normally all it takes is an email from OFFCOM and you'll have NTL's head office phoning you personally to resolve your problems within a day. A little bit of politics goes a long way.

[mr-b]

Thanks for the reminder - and I've used them before when I got trapped in a cycle of ntl stopping sending me bills and then cutting me off! It got sorted out pretty sharpish after that.

I hesitate to say this, but my connection seems to be Ok now after my CM was replaced (again). No idea if something was fixed on the network side as well to stop my ip lease from being renewed...