[Merged] NTL Increasing BB Speeds Late Summer 2004

[Stephen]

Originally Posted by andygrif

What will? The upstream? Do you know this for sure or are you guessing?

The speed changes will happen in the summer. The d/s speed will change no word on wether the u/s speed will go up accordingly.

[MovedGoalPosts]

Originally Posted by Debsy42

Late summer is all we've been told

Ah so this is "coming soon" then

[Cooper]

Dosent matter how fast they say the service is, or will be, if the infrastructure supporting the network is a shambles as it was in my area when i was with NTL's 600/1mbit service.

I had NTL broadband for 14mths in total and had no more than 2mths trouble free usage. UBR's constantly oversubscribed making online gameing a complete waste of time, unless between the hours of 2am-7am, and download speeds of between 20-30k on a 1mbit line.

Contrast that sorry tale with my current ADSL service with Pipex (1mbit) and i havent had a single outage or an online gaming ping of over 50ms in nearly 11mths and with the 256k upstream i can even host limited, but reliable games.

i would like to come back to NTL, i really would, simply in order to have an intergrated Digital TV/Broadband service, but my faith in the companys network has been shattered and simply cant face the thought of spending countless hours on the phone to tech support just to get nowhere.

[Marge]

Originally Posted by MovedGoalPosts

Ah so this is "coming soon" then

Just reading the mail now and yeah late summer so take your pick when that is

[Defiant]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04...est_broadband/

A spokesman for NTL said the announcement to double the speed of broadband services - on the same day that Telewest announced the same plan - was "pure coincidence".

Of course it was. They must think were as stupid as there board.

[Nemesis]

Originally Posted by Cooper

Dosent matter how fast they say the service is, or will be, if the infrastructure supporting the network is a shambles as it was in my area when i was with NTL's 600/1mbit service.

I had NTL broadband for 14mths in total and had no more than 2mths trouble free usage. UBR's constantly oversubscribed making online gameing a complete waste of time, unless between the hours of 2am-7am, and download speeds of between 20-30k on a 1mbit line.

Contrast that sorry tale with my current ADSL service with Pipex (1mbit) and i havent had a single outage or an online gaming ping of over 50ms in nearly 11mths and with the 256k upstream i can even host limited, but reliable games.

i would like to come back to NTL, i really would, simply in order to have an intergrated Digital TV/Broadband service, but my faith in the companys network has been shattered and simply cant face the thought of spending countless hours on the phone to tech support just to get nowhere.

Welcome to the site ... Sorry to hear about the problems you have had, but also pleased that you have found us here.

If you were to consider moving back to NTL, there is a wealth of knowledge on here, with many who are quite willing to help out where they can. We have a number of NTL techs on here, so we can only try and sort out any problems that you might have.

[Nemesis]

Originally Posted by Defiant

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04...est_broadband/


Of course it was. They must think were as stupid as there board.

Strange how we had heard the rumours from TW, but not a squeak from NTL ...

[scoobydoo[uk]]

Any info in the email about us STB users, dont think its looking good for us, as Telewest who cant upgrade 1meg STB customers, basically use the same ST boxes!.

How difficult is it to change over to a modem, a friend of mine has a spare NTL modem lying around after he moved house.

[Hell's Child]

I've had a chat with my marketing dept.


In answer to a few questions.

This will be releases "late summer" which is expected to be around July.

This should, unlike telewest, work on STB customers. If not, customers have the option to switch to SACM, although this would tie them into the broadband contract for 12 months.

Cap limit to be reviewed in line with the issue that the cap will be reached more easily with the increased speeds, more notablly with the 1.5mb and the 750k lines.

Upload to stay the same for now although switch upgrades are being looked into to allow ntl to increase upload speeds.

Hope this helps!!!

[McMav]

Originally Posted by MovedGoalPosts

As far as I know, and Telewest certainly are not changing, uploads stay the same as before and so get even more disproportionately out of sync with the download speeds.

As for criticism over ntl raising the 1meg price to £37.99 last month and now throwing the "free" speed increase into the hat, anyone recall they did a similar stunt with their base 128k service @ £14.99 went up to £17.99 and then they upped the speed to 150k "for free"?

That price hike happened when the speed was increased. you didnt go to 17.99 at 128 it was 17.99 and 150. So not quite so similar they just did the price rise and speed increase together.

[MovedGoalPosts]

Originally Posted by McMav

That price hike happened when the speed was increased. you didnt go to 17.99 at 128 it was 17.99 and 150. So not quite so similar they just did the price rise and speed increase together.

I'm pleased to be corrected

[Nemesis]

We have received this Official Announcement from an Internal NTL source

[DrAwesome]

Here is another link businesswire.com
(with regards to NTL Increasing BB Speeds)

[matrix]

this is great news

[erol]

Originally Posted by Nikko

Am I the only one to think this is actually good news?

I think this is excelent news for NTL customers and for internet users in general in the UK. Well done NTL (even if does still look like a reactive strategy and not a proactive one)

Now where's the announcment from BT Wholesale?

Originally Posted by towny

Cable broadband can provide speeds well in excess of 3 meg. However, without knowing the technical details of all this, I would imagine they would have to lower the contention ratio so that fewer subscribers are sharing the same chunk of bandwidth. If they did not, 3 meg users would fairly quickly notice they were not getting the bandwidth they have paid for.

I know that there are costs for ntl if they lower contention ratios, but someone else will have to explain how that works.

Actually the higher the bandwidth for end users the more contended they can be without any noticable effects. This is because in general people tend to do pretty much the same with more bandwidth as they did before with less (at least for an intial period of time). When the file/email/etc takes 100minutes to download that is 100minutes you are using your slice of the shared resource and thus blocking others. When that same download takes only 10 minutes your are blocking the shared resource for 1/10 of the time and thus more people can be 'loaded' onto that shared resource. That is why in dial up terms contention ratios of 10-15:1 were considered 'high' but with BB contetnion ratios of 20:1 and 50:1 are feasable.