Why does NTL broadband suck

kalebris

Welll.... not sure where to start.

First I signed up for the 30Mbit package and as a new customer I have got a "shiny" 4 port wireless router thingy despite the fact that I wanted a normal 1 port modem that has no shiny features in it, just does the job well. Fair enough I thought and started to use this 4 port wonder. Soon I realized that my browser sometimes does not want to load pages etc. or if it does it makes it jerky so I started to troubleshoot. Have done a speedtest on the speedtest.net site and got 30M/3M as expected so it's not a speed issue. Went a bit further and noticed that Firefoxs status window was stuck in looking for <suchandsuch domain>. So thought what's happening behind the scenes. Soon realized that it meant DNS resolution. So I started my test and tried to resolve the top 500 websites as quick as possible. After about 20 lookups things started to time out and slow down signifcantly. So what to translate while opening this current page I have made about 4 DNS requests. If I or anybody else in the household just opens 5 other similar (not too ad heavy) pages things start to get crappier.
So I though that's not that hard to solve, I will use googles DNS servers (I know it's quite a bit like big brother is watching but that's still better then little brother not watching only limiting) and to my surprise I got the same results. Did the test as before and got the same results. I was thinking about setting up my own DNS server but that wouldn't help an awful lot since it would involve more DNS requests. I managed to got around this with complicated tunneling and pulling a few favors and managed to get arround this issue since I was hiding my DNS requests.
To my surprise the connectivity did not get better. This time firefox got stuck in connecting to <suchandsuch domain>. This means that I can not open more then X amount of new connections. So that sucks since I experience the same thing (I guess the number of DNS requests and the number of connections are roughly the same).

Thought this is the time to contact technical support (if only they were technical..) and started with the good old nice email form that they provided on the contact us page. After detailing my issues and that I get 30Mbit/3Mbit when doing the speedtest I hit the send button and a friendly message awaits stating that "our aim is to answer your query in 3 working days" or something quite similar. I thought that's not a high aim but at least they're not lying.... well that was something like 4 weeks ago. They called about 1 week ago asking what my problem is. They asked me what DNS is... and after some painful explanation the technical support person was kinda able to understand what happens when you type in ntl.ie in the webbrowser. After some mumbling they claimed that my upstream power level is too high. Well... that might be but I have no issues with the signal quality. As far as I can see my signal is rock solid. the kind (not so much at this stage) person told me that he can see nothing wrong with the connection apart from this and a field engineer needs to be sent. So I said bring it on if I have no other way to get this issue escalated. So the field tech came and replaced all connectors and we did a speedtest and I told him that yes the speed is fine "IT'S NOT THE SPEED I'M HAVING ISSUES WITH" he left. And now I am stuck with this hellish broadband that costs quite a lot monthly and I can't even use it properly.

So went ahead and was looking for applications to remedy this issue and found a VPN service that they sell for $55 a month. so I signed up and now all is better. the speeds are not 30/3 but close enough and I finally can stop dealing with those muppets at NTL. If my contract expires I definitely won't have NTL again nor will I recommend it to anybody.

Please let me know if you go through the same type of hell as you do because it would be nice to know I'm not alone....

Spear

kalebris wrote: »

Welll.... not sure where to start.

First I signed up for the 30Mbit package and as a new customer I have got a "shiny" 4 port wireless router thingy despite the fact that I wanted a normal 1 port modem that has no shiny features in it, just does the job well.

Put it in bridge mode then. It'll avoid things such as the general crappiness of the Cisco router, including it's interfering flood protection.

UPC's DNS have been crap for many years. You'll find OpenDNS are also a decent option, if you're not comfortable with Google.