NTHell/UPC(Useless Piece of Crap)

inforfun

Mainly posting this for people who are doubting which isp to sign up with.

I ve been with NTL since february 2005 and till december 2006 i did not have a single complaint about them. Speedtests showed always a 5.9 mb dl and a 512 kb ul. In other words, getting what iu was paying for.
1 little issue about downloading too much but that was due to their user policy stating "download over 1 gb a day bla bla bla" causing me to think that the 40gb cap is for downloading only.

Now.. after NTL was taken over by UPC and started their promotion for broadband and digital tv for 6 months for 10 euro a month my connection went belly up. Only times i could get the "old" 5,9mb/512kb with speedtest was during daytime or at night. Times i am either sleeping or at work (also sleeping).

After 1 week i thought calling their customer support and ask what was going on could be an idea. Well... worst idea ever. Tried to get some kind of support by calling them for 3 months. Every time being promised a call back from bb support and later on managers to call me.
i must have been calling them at least 50 times. About 5 calls back on those 50....
2x bb support telling me to reboot the modem (*sigh*) and once telling me straight that people like myself are causing the problems because i supposedly used way more than the 40 gb a month.
When i asked how much i had used i got this perfect example of what kind of brainless twats are working there: you used 25 gb down and 17 gb up so you used 47 gb this month.......... nuff said i guess.
After 3 months i canceled my direct debit but they keep sending bills, the poor sods.
4x an engineer was supposed to drop by, saw only 1 who left after 4 minutes saying they will contact me for a line check. You guessed right... still waiting (3 weeks now)

At the moment i just send emails every day to which they don't reply either of course (apart from the auto responder)

For me it is quiet obvious what is going on, NTL is taking many more subscriptions than their infrastructure can handle. As soon as the clock hits 5/5.30 my upload speed is basically nil. Which makes online gaming, browsing the web and everything else to do with the internet a very retro experience. It behaves like a 9600 baud modem.

I read comments here from people who pay for the 6mb package, get 2 or 3 mb dl and then say " i guess i cant complain when i see the other stories here"
Damn right you can and should complain, you are not getting what you are paying for. When you pay for a Ferrari you will not get yourself send home in a Fiat Punto either, do you?

So, if you think about getting an bb connection with NTL/UPC.... DONT!!! Stay away from them unless you are a masochist.
You will not get what you pay for as it comes to speed and their customer support is non existent, a bunch of Muppets.

MartMax

Erm. They promised me an technical visit yesterday which I booked about 3-4 weeks ago. Got a SMS reminder on Friday about it. Guess what, they never turned up. This is the second time a scheduled visit that never took place. The first time was about a year ago, when I mentioned to the tech support on the phone, the girl said "Sometimes our technicians never turned up". That's a very unreasonable reasoning.

Marty

inforfun

I worked in customer support myself and all of the non-sense i got to hear from NTL support they took out of a book i wrote myself.
Just tell the customer what he wants to hear, it will keep the poor bastard of your back for a little while again
Chances are very slim that customer will get you on the phone the next time he calls.
It is sad but it simply works this way.

dlofnep

A 40 gig cap for a 6meg line is just silly. You can easily fork up 2 gigs a day just looking at silly clips on youtube and playing a few online games. I received two letters from NTL over going over the cap - I'm sorry, but I use the internet. I download, I game, I stream.. 40 gigs is nowhere near enough to do these things.

Cap should be raised to about 60gigs a month.. 2 gigs a day wouldn't be so bad.. Ideally, an 80 gig cap is fine. I work for an ISP, we have a fair usage policy - but we really don't start getting onto people unless they go over 100gigs.

inforfun

dlofnep wrote:

A 40 gig cap for a 6meg line is just silly. You can easily fork up 2 gigs a day just looking at silly clips on youtube and playing a few online games. I received two letters from NTL over going over the cap - I'm sorry, but I use the internet. I download, I game, I stream.. 40 gigs is nowhere near enough to do these things.

Cap should be raised to about 60gigs a month.. 2 gigs a day wouldn't be so bad.. Ideally, an 80 gig cap is fine. I work for an ISP, we have a fair usage policy - but we really don't start getting onto people unless they go over 100gigs.

I remember when Eircom called me about once a week if i was interested in their broadband (talking end of 2002 now), i asked about the specs. My answer was: Well sorry but a 4gb datalimit a month is gone in a day if i behave like in my days in Holland.
40 Gb on 6mb is indeed ridiculous.

Ntl did make some changes in the first year i was with them, first a price decrease that i used to just upgrade the line and a few months later they increased the speed. Now it has been quiet with those little but nice changes for 1,5 years at least, might be longer.
This shows me they could not do better or wanted to keep some in reserve for more connections. They really went over the top with their last offer in december 2006 and have to deal with more subscriptions than their out of date infrastructure can handle.

But they clearly dont give a ..... ( i will type the dots myself)

illumin

Ive had dropouts, slow speeds, no connection issues for too long now with ntl and i think there has to be a better provider out there. Ive been informed that because of the strange routing ntl seems to use that sites such as geocities.com are unreachable for the last 4-5 months. This is completely unnaceptable. Does anyone reccommend a better provider in the south dublin area? It lloks like eircom is the preferred option but its 30e for 2meg where ntl is 3meg and also has a higher download limit. i may just have to bite the bullet and go for eircom as at the moment im paying for a service which im not getting at all.

paulm17781

Try smart. Probably better priced than NTL (depending what you want) and can't be worse than NTL is right now.

freefall20

Hi Guys, I used worked in BB support when it was NTL and I can tell you that when UPC took over they completly changed the running of things from day one. Firstly we in BB support took calls directly from customers upc decided a callback system would work better and they still use this today I can assure you they prob have a backlog of about 600 people waiting to be called back. And for the cap side of things this was only suppose to be a temp thing when UPC changed the routing from INEX to Amsterdam. When we were still there last Sept we were told that routing was going back through INEX and this would eliviate slow speeds and also get rid of the cap again as any of the longer BB customers would tell you that you could download what you liked when NTL ran the show.
when you call upc now your details prob are not being passed on for a callback because UPC use 3 different call centres to take the calls for them because they dont have the staff in Limerick to do it for them. As bad as people thought we were when it was NTL it does not have a patch on the way UPC are treating its customers, and I can safely say that I dont have NTL in my house anymore because the service has gone so bad.

Snake Plisken

Its a pity we don't have one of those Watchdog programmes like they have in the UK, as its only bad publicity that will make these people sit up and listen. I know Matt Cooper did an item on it before, maybe he will do a follow up and ask them whats going on.

Snake

dub45

Snake Plisken wrote:

Its a pity we don't have one of those Watchdog programmes like they have in the UK, as its only bad publicity that will make these people sit up and listen. I know Matt Cooper did an item on it before, maybe he will do a follow up and ask them whats going on.

Snake

Since UPC took over they have had relentless bad publicity - they were humiliated in a way few companies ever were on a Joe Duffy show that I heard - but how many months on now and they just don't seem to care - they just seem to treat their customers with absolute contempt.

Just out of curiosity I emailed their sales about a fortnight ago and asked them what the contention rates were for the various bb products and guess what I am still waiting on a response.

freefall20

dub45 wrote:

Since UPC took over they have had relentless bad publicity - they were humiliated in a way few companies ever were on a Joe Duffy show that I heard - but how many months on now and they just don't seem to care - they just seem to treat their customers with absolute contempt.

Just out of curiosity I emailed their sales about a fortnight ago and asked them what the contention rates were for the various bb products and guess what I am still waiting on a response.

Contention ratio is 17:1 regardless of what speed your on. Each UBR that carries the signal to your modem can hold a max of 200 modems but each ubr prob has double this thus still creating an even slower connection for people.

dub45

freefall20 wrote:

Contention ratio is 17:1

Yes but if the general consensus is that they are signing up far too many people then surely that ratio is long gone now?

freefall20

dub45 wrote:

Yes but if the general consensus is that they are signing up far too many people then surely that ratio is long gone now?

Yes I defo agree with you but I doubt UPC have done anything about it.

dub45

freefall20 wrote:

Yes I defo agree with you but I doubt UPC have done anything about it.

Thats why I emailed them:) I was curious to see what the official postion is - but of course they dont see fit to tell people what it is they are supposedly paying for.:rolleyes:

This is what really gets me about these companies - they have no problems whatsoever in not supplying what people pay for - in providing lousy service - 'engineers' not turning up when people have taken time off work etc etc and yet they want to slap late payment fees on people and force people onto direct debits. So much for consumer rights!

Kernel

NTL/UPC are crap. It's official. Traffic shaping, woeful customer support (I have been on the receiving end of the no call backs, and have been hung up on before I even began speaking with the agent...), downtime, slow speed.. Just go with another provider folks. It's more efficacious than ringing Joe Duffy, although at least this tarnishes their reputation and warns other poor souls away.

inforfun

dub45 wrote:

Thats why I emailed them:) I was curious to see what the official postion is - but of course they dont see fit to tell people what it is they are supposedly paying for.:rolleyes:

This is what really gets me about these companies - they have no problems whatsoever in not supplying what people pay for - in providing lousy service - 'engineers' not turning up when people have taken time off work etc etc and yet they want to slap late payment fees on people and force people onto direct debits. So much for consumer rights!

I stopped paying in March and i suggest everybody who runs into the NTL/UPC crap should do the same.
I am collecting data (speedtests and all) since early january and i know my fair bit of broadband technology to know that their infrastructure is not capable of handling this many sign ups (call them freeloaders if you want). Not only is their customer support a joke, their billing department is not much better. i propse 2x to send me a bill for tv only because that pasrt is working. Nope... not received.
So now i dont pay a cent and i will not pay till i have my old stable connection back (not very likely to happen).
They might cut me off at 1 point, so be it.
It will take them some effort though to get their modems back.

Snake Plisken

anyone else's NTHell broadband acting up right now???? mine is crawling trying to do speedtest now and it just freezes

Snake

BostonB

Mine is as random as its always been.

David Michael

Snake Plisken wrote:

anyone else's NTHell broadband acting up right now???? mine is crawling trying to do speedtest now and it just freezes

Snake

Saves me starting a thread....

Been with NTL since the begining. Never understood why people complained pre 2007 tbh. Always though they were the dogs. Me in firhouse D24. I started off on the 600MB line I think. So 2003/2??

Anyway the connection has been brutal of late. In the past you might get a 2-4 hour outage every 9 to 12 months. Annoying at the time but forgivable considering the service. (never a call made to customer service so even though I think that was an issue for a lot...never bothered me)

but fk me its woefull these days. All this week when I get home it off? But seems to always come back on at 8:45-9:00 ???

Now I am not getting home till 8 ish so I don't know when it is going off as such.

God damn annoying if you want to play the iPoker 20,000 GTD at 8:30 on an evening!

Sorry for the mini rant.

NTL!!! your little cotton sox is getting durrrty!

anonymousjunkie

I've noticed the same problem, for the last two weeks my broadband has been down all day and only comes back at about 8-8.30 at night. I'm on a 6Meg line in lucan. However, last Wed/Thur it didn't come up until about 11pm and has been down ever since. I've had problems ever since I had this installed back in January (worked perfectly for the first 3 weeks then was down for a month). Never had any problems with Eircom when I was living up in Firhouse.

MOH

paulm17781 wrote:

Try smart. Probably better priced than NTL (depending what you want) and can't be worse than NTL is right now.

Definitely Smart if you can get it. I've been with them twice at two addresses (Dub city centre and D5) for about 2.5 years now. In that time speed has always matched what I'm supposed to be getting (currently 4Gb) and any line faults (only 3 that I noticed) were always fixed within hours.

zAbbo

MOH wrote:

Definitely Smart if you can get it. I've been with them twice at two addresses (Dub city centre and D5) for about 2.5 years now. In that time speed has always matched what I'm supposed to be getting (currently 4Gb) and any line faults (only 3 that I noticed) were always fixed within hours.

4Gb ? nice.

_CyRuSS_

Okay I want to join in on this rant...

I've had NTL broadband since 2001 now, up 'til only a year ago or so I never had any problems with NTL, I always got maximum download, no downtime, and they never gave out to me when I went over the download cap.

But ever since UPC has taken over, the service is a complete joke now, they re-routed all traffic to Amsterdam, which really messed up my connection. To get to an Irish website, it went from Dublin->Amsterdam->London->Dublin, how that made sense to them, I don't know, but it was like that for a while (not sure if it still is or not.. although I think they've improved it some). I can't get max download speed with 1 thread anymore, I need to use a few to get all 6mbit, same goes for uploading, 600kbps upload, and i get EXACTLY half of that when I start an upload somewhere, so then I start a 2nd upload to the exact same host as the 1st, and I get the 2nd half of my bandwidth... so I know its not a problem with upload speed on my end, and I know it isn't a problem on the other end... so why does NTL limit upload speed per connection by half? that i'd love to know. Oh and torrents... someone else here said they had a problem with torrents, yep, me too. They crawwwwwwwwll or just stop completely, it isn't my bandwidth being eaten up either, as I can max it out elsewhere, I mostly download off usenet which is fine, but torrents are impossible.

I have been monitoring my connection now for a few months, since UPC took over, at first I accepted the hiccups for the transition, but it has now been several months and some things are still not right.

Up until very recently, www.geocities.com was inaccessible for MONTHS and any geocities website, also the website http://web.archive.org/ were inaccessible for months also and tons other sites. (just noticed they're working now, but trust me they weren't before)

I'm having a lot of problems with gaming now, I play Counter-Strike: Source, and I am now getting a lot of 'choke' in game, and packet loss which makes me either lag, or gives me terrible reg (bullets not registering as hits due to packet loss/choke)... it's been making my game unplayable thanks to their crap connection.

One thing that really grinds my gears though is their lack of communication to their customers. They changed all their @ntlworld.ie email addresses to upcmail.ie a few weeks ago... did they tell me? nope! I didn't get a letter telling me of this, nor did I get an email or a phone call telling me this. One day I just couldn't log into my email.... yeh good job there, thanks for the heads up... worst customer service ever.

They still haven't got reverse DNS on their IP addresses yet after so many months, Yeah ok that is a really small thing, but a lot of IRC servers are real annoying with not letting you on if your IP address does not resolve. Plus it looks rather unprofessional, for a big ISP.

Think back to when NTL took over from Cablelink, I got a ton of information about the changeover, what they had planned, all outages that should be expected, and when they'd be resolved, tons of information. I don't think i've got a single piece of information from UPC. In fact, if I wasn't into IT and hadn't read about this takeover, I wouldn't even know that NTL as it is now, is not NTL anymore. Really pathetic... maybe its a good business strategy for them though, oversell and let the NTL brand take all the heat, then fix it up keep as many customers as possible before publicly changing name to UPC, and then draw in more suckers.

Why VirginMedia/NTL are allowing UPC to keep their brand and damage it, I do not know.

I'd love to know wtf is going on over there at NTL/UPC, what their plan is, are they even going to change name, are they even trying to improve their network? i'd love to know SOMETHING, to give me a glimmer of hope that they know their service is crap at the moment, and they're working on updating it. Right now i've just got a picture of engineers sitting on their asses doing nothing, and the executives rolling around in a pile of money as their sales & marketing team work in overdrive to oversell their crappy service.

dub45

_CyRuSS_ wrote:

Okay I want to join in on this rant...

.....................................

One thing that really grinds my gears though is their lack of communication to their customers. They changed all their @ntlworld.ie email addresses to upcmail.ie a few weeks ago... did they tell me? nope! I didn't get a letter telling me of this, nor did I get an email or a phone call telling me this. One day I just couldn't log into my email.... yeh good job there, thanks for the heads up... worst customer service ever.....................
.....................................

I'd love to know wtf is going on over there at NTL/UPC, what their plan is, are they even going to change name, are they even trying to improve their network? i'd love to know SOMETHING, to give me a glimmer of hope that they know their service is crap at the moment, and they're working on updating it. Right now i've just got a picture of engineers sitting on their asses doing nothing, and the executives rolling around in a pile of money as their sales & marketing team work in overdrive to oversell their crappy service.

Yes I agree with you the lack of communication is extraordinary - it is particularly ironic given that the reason they gave to that famous 'Joe Duffy' show which lacerated them, for not sending along a representative was that they preferred to communicate directly with their customers!!

I think they have only communicated directly with their customers since the takeover when they wanted to force people onto direct debits and introduce late payment fees:rolleyes:

Although I do get a direct communication from them at least once a week offering me their digital tv service.

christophicus

_CyRuSS_ wrote:

I have been monitoring my connection now for a few months, since UPC took over, at first I accepted the hiccups for the transition, but it has now been several months and some things are still not right.

.

I agree completely with most of what you say. And that quote is exactly how I am feeling at the moment. I am really thinking of trying to get Smart. But Eircom have installed crappy wiring all over this area, and the phones upstairs dont even work!!!!

I think we got notice of the email changeover though.

_CyRuSS_

christophicus wrote:

I agree completely with most of what you say. And that quote is exactly how I am feeling at the moment. I am really thinking of trying to get Smart. But Eircom have installed crappy wiring all over this area, and the phones upstairs dont even work!!!!

I think we got notice of the email changeover though.

well i never got any notice :mad:

As for Smart. Ok I am out of the loop, but last I heard about Smart was they were terrible, and going bankrupt. Has something happened since then?

christophicus

Smart from what I hear are supposed to be one of the best at teh moment. I Have not heard any complaints about them at all. Maybe people with smart can let us knkow .Yeah they did have financial problems due to Eircom Effectively not doing anything about LLU,but smart seem to be on the up at the moment. And frankly I would much rather pay €45 for a 6Mb line with phone, that torrents actually go full speed on (smart) then €40 fopr a6Mb line without phone and that torrents do not work on. Smart would appear to be the best ISP avaiable atm.

inforfun

_CyRuSS_ wrote:

Okay I want to join in on this rant...


I'm having a lot of problems with gaming now, I play Counter-Strike: Source, and I am now getting a lot of 'choke' in game, and packet loss which makes me either lag, or gives me terrible reg (bullets not registering as hits due to packet loss/choke)... it's been making my game unplayable thanks to their crap connection.

Exactly the same thing here when playing PES6 online.

I ve stopped paying the Dicks in march by stopping the direct debit. Proposed them to send me a separate bill for tv, since that is working. They would come back on that. of course they didn't.
First 2 bills i received went straight into the big grey archive. This week there will be another bill from them that will be send back with a letter telling to stop bothering me.

I just dont hope they are stupid enough to disconnect me and send someone to pick up the modems because i predict that that person will be getting a lot of my frustration to deal with.

dub45

inforfun wrote:

Exactly the same thing here when playing PES6 online.

I ve stopped paying the Dicks in march by stopping the direct debit. Proposed them to send me a separate bill for tv, since that is working. They would come back on that. of course they didn't.
First 2 bills i received went straight into the big grey archive. This week there will be another bill from them that will be send back with a letter telling to stop bothering me.

I just dont hope they are stupid enough to disconnect me and send someone to pick up the modems because i predict that that person will be getting a lot of my frustration to deal with.

If you are not going to pay a bill because of poor service you should make sure that you have documentary evidence that you have reported this poor service to the isp how they responded etc etc. Otherwise you leave yourself open to the company pursuing you for unpaid bills and in the case of some isps passing your details to debt collectors. If you have not got a well documented case then you will not have a leg to stand on in the eyes of the law.

inforfun

Well, from the moment i noticed that the connection (most of all the upload) was gone i did several speed tests every evening.
First 3 months i called them on a daily basis but since that was getting me nowhere except high phonebills is stopped doing that. From that moment on i just emailed them at least once a week.

Speedtests and emails i still have, phonecalls are quite hard to proof apart from the fact that calls made with my mobile i do have proof of as well.

I wouldnt be so pissed off as i am with them now if they at least had tried to come to a solution. But their arrogant attitude, their neglect and the complete incompetence of their customer support got me to a point that i am prepared to do whatever it takes to get what i have been paying for.

christophicus

Anyone else having really bad connections with NTL at the moment??

Web pages are only loading once in every ten attempts and ventrilo keeps disconnecting as does steam. My brothers MSN keeps logging off also. Is anyone else getting this?

dub45

inforfun wrote:

Well, from the moment i noticed that the connection (most of all the upload) was gone i did several speed tests every evening.
First 3 months i called them on a daily basis but since that was getting me nowhere except high phonebills is stopped doing that. From that moment on i just emailed them at least once a week.

Speedtests and emails i still have, phonecalls are quite hard to proof apart from the fact that calls made with my mobile i do have proof of as well.

I wouldnt be so pissed off as i am with them now if they at least had tried to come to a solution. But their arrogant attitude, their neglect and the complete incompetence of their customer support got me to a point that i am prepared to do whatever it takes to get what i have been paying for.

I sympathise with you totally but just make sure you have yourself covered thats all I am saying - it is so easy to come out on the wrong side of these things no matter how correct you are.

BostonB

inforfun wrote:

...

Speedtests and emails i still have, phonecalls are quite hard to proof apart from the fact that calls made with my mobile i do have proof of as well....

No really you write down the time date of call who you spoke to and the general gist of the converstation. Then send them a letter or email along the lines of ...further to our phone converstation where mr X said Y...etc. I do this all the time to confirm what was said in a phone converstation because someone using it so not to leave a paper trail.

BostonB

dub45 wrote:

Yes I agree with you the lack of communication is extraordinary - ....
Although I do get a direct communication from them at least once a week offering me their digital tv service.

Same here but about the phone service. I'm going to complain to them about it the next time. I wish they'd use people who canspeak clearly, most of them have strong accents complelely unsuited to telesales.

MOH

_CyRuSS_ wrote:

well i never got any notice :mad:

As for Smart. Ok I am out of the loop, but last I heard about Smart was they were terrible, and going bankrupt. Has something happened since then?

Nope, that was Eircon's spin, and it seems to have worked quite well. Most people I tell I'm with Smart say "didn't they go bust?".

Mind you, that's also largely Smart's fault for not advertising "we're still here" enough.

They dropped their phone only service, but bundled broadband is still fine.

They did shed a lot of customer service people, and I did here early this year a lot of people complaining about long set-up times, but if you can get it it's well worth it. Had my first service loss that I've noticed in at least 6 months last Friday morning, and it was back up inside 2 hours. Apart from that I'm getting solid 4Mb donwloads the whole time.

_CyRuSS_

MOH wrote:

Nope, that was Eircon's spin, and it seems to have worked quite well. Most people I tell I'm with Smart say "didn't they go bust?".

Mind you, that's also largely Smart's fault for not advertising "we're still here" enough.

They dropped their phone only service, but bundled broadband is still fine.

They did shed a lot of customer service people, and I did here early this year a lot of people complaining about long set-up times, but if you can get it it's well worth it. Had my first service loss that I've noticed in at least 6 months last Friday morning, and it was back up inside 2 hours. Apart from that I'm getting solid 4Mb donwloads the whole time.

actually, it wasn't just that.. i even went to Smart telecoms corporate website, and it showed their share prices or whatever (i don't really know this stuff) but it did have a pretty graph, which went very very low, just about to the €0 mark.... looked like they were having a lot of trouble at the time, maybe they're out of that now and back on the way up... if that's the case, good for them... we need more competition here

funny tho, since then it seems they've removed the Share prices page from their website, probably because of the embarrassing graph/prices... wonder what they're worth now

Grommet

they are privately owned now - so no publicly quoted share price

,8,1

Are NTL enforcing their broadband cap lately? I'm pretty sure I've exceeded it on occasion but I've not been automatically upgraded to their dearer packages which is what the procedure is supposed to be...

okcomputer

holy **** you people experiencing slow speeds are lucky, my connection is completely out. can you get smart without signing up to their phone package? whats irishbroadband DSL like?