NTL are poo

[Ginger]

So we are on NTL broadband and they are poo, my connection goes down regularly, the only time I see anything remotely near the 8mb I pay for is at 4 in the morning and the connection becomes sluggish as hell when all the kids come home from school and on weekends. So I want to change provider, can anyone make any recommendations, I had BT ADSL 5 years ago and found that to be really good and I'm considering going back to them now.

[Wrestlevania]

The only broadband provider I hear get more shit on a regular basis nowadays than NTL are BT, so I'd avoid at all costs to be honest.

I've been using Tiscali for the last 2 years with no problems whatsoever, including their call package. In fact, BT just gave me a £101 refund this quarter because I'm spending so much less on phone calls.

[Nick]

I never had problems with NTL, got Virgin installed in my new flat a couple of weeks ago and haven't had any disconnects. I think it's probably just you downloading too much Pr0n.

[Nachimir]

I'm given to understand a lot of providers are just renting cable off BT anyway. Quality of service depends largely on your region, around the midlands I've heard lots of bad things about NTL and lots of good things about BT. YMMV elsewhere.

My NTL connection is generally reliable, though when it occasionally does go down their customer service is shit. NTL also have fairly poor upload speeds compared to other providers, as the network Diamond Cable put down in the early 90's was designed for cable TV, not packet switching.

You will also rarely, if ever, get all of the speed advertised. "Unlimited" is a blatant lie on advertising for broadband, they don't even hire 8 megs of bandwidth for each customer. The logic goes that not all customers will use their connections to the full, nor will thier use be constant, so companies can save money by setting a contention ratio and only hiring sufficient bandwidth to meet it.

BT, I believe, have download limits, and NTL have been messing around with traffic shaping - 8 meg connections will frequenly drop to 4 megs during the wee hours, etc., and this seems to be inflicted on heavy users.

Also, check your cable modem. New NTL connections use NTL:250 modems, but after many connection upgrades we were still left with an NTL:100, which is ancient. They can't handle the increased power they've been shoving down the lines around here now, and a lot of old cable modems are starting to break. An engineer swapped it and suddenly the connection became a lot more usable.

[eljay]

If you can get Be broadband in your area, then I can get us each a free month if we do the recommendation thing they have.

It's 24Meg for £24.99 a month, although as with any broadband service your actual bandwidth will vary depending on your distance from the exchange.

Check if you can get it here.

I've had no problems with the service.

[Wrestlevania]

Tiscali, like pretty much every "high street" (read: non-specialist) supplier, have a fair use policy. It basically states that there's a nominal GB limit on downloads per month, per user. They also reserve the right to reduce connection performance on certain technologies (primarily anything P2P) "at peak times" - which means whenever network load begins to mount.

However, in my experience they very rarely limit P2P nowadays (for me at least). Moreover when they do/did impose speed restrictions on your connection, it was only on what they said it would be, i.e. P2P protocols; everything else (like streaming video) still flew along as usual.

One of the best things about Tiscali though is the upstream on their connections. Unlike cable connections, where the upstream is 32kbits, Tiscali give you a juicy 256kbits. In plain English, you get 32kbytes/sec. dedicated uploads from your connection and also impressively low latency; last time I played Counter-Strike, for example, my ping was reliably bobbing around the 30-40ms mark. Big thumbs up.

[Thrik]

NTL (now Virgin) has always been extremely good for gaming in my experience, being both fast and stable; however, the overall speeds of web browsing and downloading leave a lot to be desired, and you occasionally get weird web errors like DNS being wrecked, resulting in lots of sites being inaccessible.

Back on the Half-Life 1 engine I used to seriously get a ping of 12 at all times and sometimes as low as 8 on pretty much any UK server, although they were lowest on Jolt. Newer games have pushed that up somewhat, but it was still almost always below 50 in Battlefield 2. I generally have the lowest ping on any server in any game when I look at the player list whatever the case, and that was back on their 2mbps connection (I'm on 4mbps now).

On the other hand, I get a shit 22kB/s upload speed for uploads in comparison to my 450kB/s or whatever for downloading. For general browsing I can't really complain, but being a professional web developer you can probably imagine the frustration dealing with such a wank speed brings.

I would move to one of the many, many BT-line-using ISPs out there like Be There, but this house doesn't have a fucking BT line. What kind of house doesn't have a BT line, you ask? One with a father in it who, when asked specifically shortly after the Diamond Cable buy-out if he'd like one reinstalling for free after a street-wide reinstallation, said "No thanks, we have NTL".

LOL!! :tup:

[Nachimir]

Argh!

Ping will vary depending on where you are. Here, on a 4 meg NTL connection with 45K up, I get pings about 80 - 150.

[Thrik]

That's only on newer games though, right? If not there must be some serious difference between Nottingham and Mansfield, which is where I live.