[Merged] NTL Increasing BB Speeds Late Summer 2004

[zoombini]

Bullpoop!

Its all big bullpoop. No matter what NTL say they are going to do, the service will always be rubbish, the computer will always make those billing errors & the red button is never ever going to work.
Increasing the speed will still be crappier than ADSL no matter how fast they think its going to be.
Email will often go down as will the newsgroups.

I'm glad I'm getting out of it.

[DeadKenny]

Originally Posted by andygrif

Mick, I know this has probably been done to death, but if you have 50% more bandwidth, are you seriously going to download 50% more (i.e more than 1gb a day)?

I think the net result (no pun intended) is that you'll maybe browse more websites (becuase they will load faster, but you will probably spend the same amount of time browsing) but you're unlikely to download more software, videos, music etc - I may be wrong, but this seems logical to me.

Exactly. During the trials I monitored my usage and found although it makes it slightly nicer for downloads in that they come down quicker sometimes (if you can get a download that will run at full speed), and sometimes graphics intensive web sites seem to load a little quicker, when I looked at the graphs my average usage for 99% of the time was little more than a couple of hundred kbps on downstream. The vast majority of the 1Mbps capacity was being unused, so the extra 50% (for "free"... my arse!), makes naff all difference to me.

I'd rather not be paying £3 extra for the "free" 500kbps extra and they keep 1Mbps at £35.

What justification does NTL have for hiking the 1Mbps fee anyway, when Telewest have it lower and many ADSL ISPs are competing to reduce or maintain prices not increasing them?

[orangebird]

Originally Posted by DeadKenny

<SNIP>

What justification does NTL have for hiking the 1Mbps fee anyway, when Telewest have it lower and many ADSL ISPs are competing to reduce or maintain prices not increasing them?

Just to point out - Telewest 1meg is only cheaper if you have more than one service with them. Therefore if you have BB only with either Telewest OR ntl, you'll pay the same price (£37.99 pm).

Originally Posted by andygrif

Mick, I know this has probably been done to death, but if you have 50% more bandwidth, are you seriously going to download 50% more (i.e more than 1gb a day)?

I think the net result (no pun intended) is that you'll maybe browse more websites (becuase they will load faster, but you will probably spend the same amount of time browsing) but you're unlikely to download more software, videos, music etc - I may be wrong, but this seems logical to me.

I know what you are saying andy, but I feel that people will think that if they have more speed they can download more and with a 1.5MB connection it does open the scale up more, which is why I think personally, ntl need to review the cap for at least the 1.5MB customers.

[erol]

Originally Posted by orangebird

Just to point out - Telewest 1meg is only cheaper if you have more than one service with them. Therefore if you have BB only with either Telewest OR ntl, you'll pay the same price (£37.99 pm).

maybe purely by 'conincidence' of course NTL will start to offer 1MB BB at £35pm provided you take at least one other NTL service

[orangebird]

Originally Posted by erol

maybe purely by 'conincidence' of course NTL will start to offer 1MB BB at £35pm provided you take at least one other NTL service

Myabe they will. They're bound to merge anyway, so may as well get things such as tariffs on the same level while they can..

Originally Posted by erol

maybe purely by 'conincidence' of course NTL will start to offer 1MB BB at £35pm provided you take at least one other NTL service

Wouldn't ntl be taking a step backwards doing that?

Remembers the days when you had to have Digital TV to qualify for BB.

[Florence]

Originally Posted by orangebird

Just to point out - Telewest 1meg is only cheaper if you have more than one service with them. Therefore if you have BB only with either Telewest OR ntl, you'll pay the same price (£37.99 pm).

Yes but if you have TV or Telephone from Telewest you get 1mb for £34.99 hence all who downgraded wouldn't have if NTL had adopted the sime logic. I have telephone and used to have 1mb but now on 600K giving NTL £10 less per month.

[orangebird]

Originally Posted by Kits

Yes but if you have TV or Telephone from Telewest you get 1mb for £34.99 hence all who downgraded wouldn't have if NTL had adopted the sime logic.

That's what I said.....

I have telephone and used to have 1mb but now on 600K giving NTL £10 less per month.

Which IMPO is what ntl wanted people to do....

[erol]

Originally Posted by Mick

I know what you are saying andy, but I feel that people will think that if they have more speed they can download more and with a 1.5MB connection it does open the scale up more, which is why I think personally, ntl need to review the cap for at least the 1.5MB customers.

There is both a 'lag factor' and a correlation between BB capacity to user and volumes downloaded.

The 'lag factor' is that people do not immediately start to download more as their connection speed goes up.

There is also however a very real relationship between the speed of an end users connection and the voulmes they download (and upload) once the 'lag factor' is worked through. After all when TW (and shortly after NTL) finally start to offer 10mbs symetrical connections at the same price as 1mbs connections are now (in about say 3 years) people will not just grab all their data in 13.5 mins (by my very rough / quick calculation of a 1 gig cap) and be done with it. They will use more volumes up and down.

Or to put it another 'more realistic' way people DO download more with BB than they did with dial up - once they have worked through the lag factor. A mere 50% increase in speed may not make this obvious but once you start getting into 'true' digital economies of orders of magnitude (10* and 100*) increases then the realtionship becomes a lot clearer.

[jigman]

what i want know is why we have to wait when the telewest people get it at the end of next month surely i cannot be that hard to do !!!!

[orangebird]

Originally Posted by jigman

what i want know is why we have to wait when the telewest people get it at the end of next month surely i cannot be that hard to do !!!!

We have a lot more customers, network and billing systems to deal with than telewest. Also, I don't think we thought about this for as long as telewest have either...

[Neil]

Looks like the upload will be staying the same after all.....

Note: Customers on the new 300K service will not be able to use Broadband Plus or the Games Consoles services.

So....all of a sudden the people who had cr4ppy connections/poor browsing/high pings/non existant email etc, are now happy because ntl have increased their download speed?

*Thinks*-poor battered network to begin with, increase in speed=poorer/more battered network.

[Nemesis]

Originally Posted by Orangebird

Also, I don't think we thought about this for as long as telewest have either...

*cough* 24 hours *cough*

[jigman]

point taken but i think i would have been far better to announce it when it was about to happen