NTL now available should i get it?

cold_filter

NTL has just become available. Mainly i will be using it for downloading films etc, is it worthwhile? I have seen people have been having problems recently.

cold_filter

anybody.......

BendiBus

I find NTL broadband excellent. Others find it crap. Where are you? Someone local might be a source of a better opinion.

cold_filter

I'm in tallaght, beside the new citywest shopping centre

Gran Hermano

Find a blunt chainsaw and stick it down your trousers.. it'll be less painful
than using NTL. Their unofficial traffic shaping since the Chorus merger under
Chello means that they are useless for any torrents. Plus their usage policy
about download caps is rubbish and there is no way to measure your usage
provided by them - you 'll just get a letter in the post. Some NTL users
received letters informing them they would be disconnected in X number of
days without ever receiving a warning.

Stevek101

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I can't stress that enough.

dub45

There really are more than enough recent threads here about NTL/Chorus etc which would suggest to even the most kindly person that the company have many many issues to resolve before they could get a strong recommendation.

Most dsl providers have six month contracts which would allow you to get bb and hopefully (for all our sakes as the bb world needs competition) allow NTL and their various incarnations to get their act together.

cold_filter

how about digiweb?

meglome

I'm in town and in general it's excellent and I'm very happy with it but...

The routing is crazy, going via Paris and Amsterdam for a server down the road. If you have a problem they are terrible, last time I got lucky and saw an NTL engineer outside our block. Time before that it took three weeks for them to fix it.

cast_iron

NTL - absolute rubbish.

Off for the last 2 days in D2 (both TV and Broadband), for the 2nd time in 3 weeks. Randomly breaks down besides.

Forget downloading movies or any torrents. 5Kb-6Kb seems to be the max speed you will get, though others around here claim to be getting more.

Stevek101

I use to get higher download speeds than I should of gotten on my 3mb connection. Now I struggle to download above 100kB/sec with an average of about 40kB/sec. NTL's routing is outrageous this would seem to be the issue.

If you have a problem they'll be ever so kind offering to send out and engineer but they will never show. Sometimes they offer a technician to call you back to help fix your problem however you will never get that call. Basically they couldn't give a flying **** about their customers so steer as far away as you can.

I am considering switching to Smart and then getting rid of my tv as well as I don't want to be supporting such a disgraceful organisation.

dub45

This insistence on sending out 'engineers' to apparently every reported fault must cost them an absolute fortune.:rolleyes:

Surely there must be some technology available which allows them to diagnose and isolate faults without sending someone out each time?

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who had left them after many years of previously good service to go to Eircom and he was telling me that they had been obsessive about sending out an engineer even though he knew well that the ongong problem was not in his house (Several neighbouring houses were also having problems) - the 'house call' meant taking time off work etc etc. And what did the engineer say when he eventually arrived.......................

Sponge Bob

thats because ntl is run by those muppets in chorus in limerick nowadays.

ntl got rid of their waterford call centre late last year

cast_iron

I think this "sending out an engineer" is just stalling tactics. It doesn't cost that much - as they rarely show.

When a CS representative told me yesterday on the phone that much of D2 was down, they still tried to get me to take time of work for an "engineer" to call over next Wednesday! Then she seemed confused when I asked her why the hell she thought he could do something 5 days from now in my house, when the entire area around me was out of service now.

Personally, I think she was hoping I'd be even more stupid than her.

Sad Professor

I recently switched from ntl to Smart. I was with ntl for about 4 years and to be fair I didn't have that many problems in the latter years. However when the service did go down it tended to stay down for days. And they're customer service is truly horrendous. I decided to switch after they started f**king with p2p speeds.

From what I can see UPC are mostly focused on getting new customers and have no interest in improving the existing service. I'm still with them for the basic tv package but I hope to be rid of that shortly also.

dub45

cast_iron wrote:

I think this "sending out an engineer" is just stalling tactics. It doesn't cost that much - as they rarely show.

When a CS representative told me yesterday on the phone that much of D2 was down, they still tried to get me to take time of work for an "engineer" to call over next Wednesday! Then she seemed confused when I asked her why the hell she thought he could do something 5 days from now in my house, when the entire area around me was out of service now.

Personally, I think she was hoping I'd be even more stupid than her.

Given the nature of the way they supply the product you would think that the requirement for a visit of an engineer would be relatively rare -the modem seems to be relatively immune to user interference and a reset seems to solve a lot of problems.

If there is a problem in a particular area they presumably get lots of calls which surely gives them at least a clue that there is a general problem etc etc.

The strategy of piling in customers surely is counter productive as lots of them presumably are contributing little revenue with the special offers available and the departure of customers that we are hearing about on here so often (remember that big staff meeting they called not so long ago:rolleyes: ) must eventually tell on their profit figures.

In theory UPC could not have come into the market at a better time - Eircom are a sitting duck for any company with the products UPC have to offer and yet they have only generated extra customers for Eircom.

UPC seem to have complete contempt for customers - there has been no attempt whatsoever to communicate with customers - if only to say sort of bear with us and in six months things will be better etc. They have worsened the products previously offered in a number of ways. They appear to have no service standards whatsoever - a three week wait for an engineer who does not show does not seem to be a rare occurrence at all.

Could they really have made a worse mess of things? (Even BK has stopped posting in their defense:))

falteringstar

Nooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ixoy

I got it a few weeks ago, purely on the fact that the landline was disconnected here and I didn't want to wait around to get hooked up.

So far, there's been no real issues. No connection problems and the one time I tried out a speed test, it reported the full speed back to me. The only thing I notice is that torrents sometimes appear slow and then shoot up to high speeds before reverting - seems less steady. It could be the nature of torrents or something and it's not caused major issues yet but something to consider.

FWIW, I'm in Portmarnock and if I could've, I would've got Smart again. Alas, it's not here so I had to make do. Not the nightmare I feared it might be when signing up.

GerardKeating

Gran Hermano wrote:

Their unofficial traffic shaping since the Chorus merger underChello means that they are useless for any torrents.

Not actually true, maybe your milage is different, but torrents work fine for me here on NTL.

Which NTL package do you have, and which part of the network, and which torrent clients ?

Fresh Pots

its not the worst, its not the most reliable, the download limits should be higher and well the speed was never a problem for me. overall i'd try and get some other provider coz there must be better out there

koloughlin

I'm on NTL in Galway and to be fair to them it has been fine in recent months. I did have very bad contention issues in the evenings last Autumn. It was so bad that I couldn't use my VoIP phone after 5pm, which was very, very annoying. However in recent months (touch wood) I haven't had any problems. Any time I bother to check now I get the advertised speeds of 6mpbs down and 512 kbps up.

I rarely use torrents. I've used them once or twice to get linux installation isos, so I'm not sure what torrent performance is like here. For me restricting peer to peer sharing (if NTL is doing so) is probably a good thing because it reduces the load on the network, and prevents problems like those I mentioned above.

One poster above mentioned that they had no way of knowing how much they are downloading and uploading to be sure they are staying within the fair use policy. If anyone is running one of the open source alternative firmwares on their router, e.g. openwrt or dd-wrt, then one option is to run vnstat http://humdi.net/vnstat/ on your router to keep account of all traffic.

stoneroses

Sponge Bob wrote:

thats because ntl is run by those muppets in chorus in limerick nowadays.

ntl got rid of their waterford call centre late last year

Not True. Their Call Centre consolidated to Limerick but HQ is in NTL Building Dublin I believe.