My recent complaint to NTL and how it was handled:

FAO: Support managers – Broadband, Digital Television and Customer Care.



To who it concerns,


I am writing to express my disappointment in the level of service that I have recieved from UPC regarding my Internet connection and digital television service.


I have contacted your customer service centre on a number ocassions regarding these issues. Unfortunately however, problems are still not resolved and the level of customer service is below poor.


I am experiencing loss of connection with both services on a daily basis now. This has been on going at least the last two months. At first I thought perhaps it was a network maintenance/ repair outage but it appears now.


On the following dates I have experienced the most noticable loss of internet and television service over periods of 2 – 8hours:


2007

Friday November 23rd 2007

Wednesday November 28th 2007

Thursday November 29th 2007

Saturday December 15th 2007

Sunday December 16th 2007

Monday December 17th 2007


2008

Tuesday January 8th 2008

Wednesday January 9th 2008


After contacting your customer service department in late 2007 to arrange a technician call out, you can imagine my disappointment when no technician attended.


I also contacted your customer service department today (January 9th 2008) when I experienced loss of service. I was told that they would arrange an engineer callout and that the problem is probably a fault with the physical line in (and not internally).


The problem to me does not appear to be internally nor does it seem to be with the line in to my apartment as my router can aquire an external IP address. I have tested this with several different routers and have come to the same conclusion.


I found that not one of the neighbouring apartments serviced by UPC had outages today.


Furthermore to add to my frustration, I didn't feel very confident while speaking with your support representatives and to be quite honest I was amazed at the lack of knowledge while trying to get a few questions answered.


While I realize as an MCSE and Novell Network Specialist that everyone has to start somewhere, I do think that customer service personnel should receive relevant training in critical areas that matter such as DHCP, DNS, TCP/IP Ports and services or at least their definitions.



Perhaps you can answer my questions for me:


As a developer I use bittorrent applications regularly to seed/download my own updates and releases (within my download CAP usually on port 50505 - which is not the standard). I found that recently my bittorrent speeds are up to 40 times slower than they have been in the past with previous ISP's (on a connection that is said to be slower than my current with UPC). However, when I tunnel my connection through a VPN I get full speeds.


Is it possible that my regular bittorrent ports have been blocked / use of bittorrent has been restricted using a specific application?


While I do realize that I may be wrong, to the best of my knowledge this is not mentioned in my contract anywhere. This is an issue with several ISP's that has been highlighted online. In some cases this has been referred to as “discrimination of data types/services”.


I would appreciate it if you could do all that you can to improve this in the future.




Secondly, I am finding myself having to use DNS servers of other ISP's such as Esat or free DNS services such as OpenDNS because the UPC DNS servers cannot resolve several websites that I visit on a regular basis.

One of the most noticeable is http://del.icio.us/ - Registered by Yahoo

Why can't your DNS servers resolve these domain names?





I feel that I should be credited for the service that I am paying for and not receiving – I would like to hear you opinion on this.


I would be very grateful if you could look into this and the above issues.


If the regular periods of downtime continue I will have to move to a different ISP and will advise my neighbours and friends to do so also .


Please keep in mind I would be more than happy to pay any amount for the service if it worked.


Thankyou for taking the time to read my email.


I look forward to being able to read your reply from my Inbox.



Regards,

Dear Sir/Madam



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