NTL Suspends Telephone Service

Lenny

illumin wrote:

So what phone company would anyone reccomend switching over to now?

I think its bakc to eircom anyways..
because I have to get the house re-wired... and this is gona be misrable

eircomtribunal

sjones wrote:

It will be very interesting to see what the saftey issue is.

Overheating of the power supply.

P.

spanner_head

Hope its ok to post up this article in today Irish Times.
I still haven't heard anything from NTL about it. Great customer service ;-)

We maybe be able to some money back.......

NTL may pay customers' phone fees
By Jamie Smyth, Technology Reporter *
*
*NTL Ireland could face a bill of more than €50,000 following its decision to stop offering customers a direct telephone service to their homes.
The cable firm, which provides direct telephone services to 2,000 customers in Tallaght and Rathfarnham, Dublin, said at the weekend that it was stopping its telephone service due to safety concerns with its equipment.
The decision sparked outrage among consumers yesterday, many of whom are now without a telephone service after being told by NTL to unplug their phones.
Reacting to NTL's decision, the Commission for Communication Regulation (ComReg) ordered the telecoms firm to pay the reconnection fees for its consumers to move to alternative operators.
"NTL is required to protect its consumers and the company must must offer an alternative provider without delay and without exposing them to additional costs associated with the transfer," said Mr John Doherty, chairman of ComReg.
Some of NTL Ireland's customers have already asked Eircom for reconnection and have been charged a fee of €24.99 if their homes already have an existing Eircom line.
The reconnection fee for consumers without an existing line is €129. Mr Mark Mohan, NTL Ireland's director of marketing, said the firm had acted as soon as it had been informed of the potential dangers.
He rejected that NTL was ceasing the service for commercial rather than safety reasons.
The cable firm's equipment supplier Tellabs, last night insisted that it did not believe that its telephone product was faulty.
Tellabs makes the cablespan unit which connects to NTL's cable and the telephone to enable them to make and receive calls over the firm's cable network.
It is understood that NTL believes that the cablespan units are faulty and may overheat and cause a fire risk. There have been at least two reported incidents in Ireland since the products were installed in homes from 2000.
In a statement, Tellabs said: "Tellabs rigorously tests all products prior to deployment. We are aware of two isolated incidents that have raised this concern. We do not believe that Tellabs' product is faulty."
A Tellabs spokesman said it had not yet reached a conclusion as to what had caused the overheating and was working with NTL on the matter.
Last year NTL stopped taking orders for another type of telephone service it offered because the service was not profitable.



© The Irish Times

scojones

do you have a link to the finding?

seamus

Moved. Moriarty, do you want to merge the two threads and/or move them to Nets/Comms?

eircomtribunal

sjones wrote:

do you have a link to the finding?

No, but I read it or heard it with the additional information, that this is why customers have been advised to unplug the devices.

P.

Lenny

sjones, check the oter topic about the ntl phone service, someone has posted an article aswell

ScorpioXdi

Lenny wrote:

I think the fault is in the box that about 1foot x 1foot, and you plug it in.. thats the danger equipment.
over in uk they don't have these bozxes in their houses because they already have decent lines afaik and didn't need to go around cleaning up another telecoms lazyness mess

Yeah, that's the box I'm talking about. Do they use the existing BT lines for the UK telephony service? I wonder if ntl have left themselves open to a defamation lawsuit from Tellabs? A quick search hasn't really revealed any public safety recommendations about their equipment, and if the equipment is OK, then the only other variable would be the people who did the installation.

Moriarty

Threads merged and moved over to Nets/Comms.

Lenny

Lad is here taking out the ntl box now,
I thought it would be awhile before they do it.. now I have the long await for eircom to come out and have to reqire the house again and the garden
Yer man is saying a house went on fire and the start of the fire or start of heatsource came from a wall which was around the location of the ntl box was the only known source near it, but he is saying it could have been anything around it, ie old wiring through the house

NeVeR

any idea what part of tallaght is efected?


I'm in tallaght and i didnt hear anything,,

Lenny

A lot of poeple haven't heard anything
Its *everyone* that has the 2 way network phone line installed

NeVeR

i have 2 phone lines,,,, ahh , 1 in my room and 1 down stairs,


I thought there would have been more then 2000 people in tallaght with this.

theres over 100,000 people in tallaght, i know they dont all have NTL but there has to be more then 2000

ScorpioXdi

Just thought I'd post a couple of links to show what a can of worms ntl seem to have opened.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/12/ntl_phone_comreg/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/13/ntl_tellabs/

http://www.tellabs.com/news/2004/nr101204.shtml

Tellabs seem to be fairly adamant that there's no problem with the cablespan boxes, and given the installed user base, and the assumption that they're not covering anything up (which I'm sure they're not - if there was a fire hazard present in the boxes, they would have been hit with class action lawsuits before the flames were out), I'd be inclined to believe them.

seamus

It's a blatant excuse to ditch the telephone business for the time being.

There's no reason to shut down a service because the hardware doesn't work.

Whether they'll try to relaunch in a few years with VOIP is another story. They certainly have the capability.

tck

ScorpioXdi wrote:

Just thought I'd post a couple of links to show what a can of worms ntl seem to have opened.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/12/ntl_phone_comreg/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/13/ntl_tellabs/

http://www.tellabs.com/news/2004/nr101204.shtml

Tellabs seem to be fairly adamant that there's no problem with the cablespan boxes, and given the installed user base, and the assumption that they're not covering anything up (which I'm sure they're not - if there was a fire hazard present in the boxes, they would have been hit with class action lawsuits before the flames were out), I'd be inclined to believe them.

2 cases (of which are in eire) out of 600,000

probably was a bad installation, which someone had mentioned happened quite some time ago, maybe they are doing it for other reasons..

VoIP is cheaper and easier these days.

Ripwave

tck wrote:

probably was a bad installation, which someone had mentioned happened quite some time ago, maybe they are doing it for other reasons.

The apparent lack of joined up thinking on NTLs behalf is scarey. VoIP has the potential to be a significant earner for them. Or it did before they associated the name "NTL telephony" with "house set on fire" in the public mind.

If the problem was that NTL swapped whatever US transformer Telllabs provided with some dodgy POS that overheated, then the sensble thing to have done was to simply replace the powersupplies. At the very least, by sending an engineer to each users house, they could have checked if any of them are overheating.

Ripwave

cableguy wrote:

Ntl don't make any modification to equipment supplied. Tellabs will design equipment to suit the different voltages in the countries they supply. Same as any company that supplies equipment worldwide.

According to Tellabs, IF there was a problem, it was because NTL didn't install the devices properly. And swapping the power supplies because they couldn't get ones from Tellabs with 3 pin plugs is the sort of "not installed properly" situation that seems most likely to me.