Got a call from ntl

UberNewb

TempestSabre wrote:

Grammar nazi replace ASDL and DSL for Broadband. So I forgot Cable, big deal. :rolleyes: Obviously we've been imagining the problems in our area and all those support calls and engineer visits were a complete figment of our imagination. Low pings, high latency and being unable to connect for a a hour or more are signs of low contention. Thanks for correcting me in that. Those upgrades to the infrastructure that did improve things must have just been coincidence.:rolleyes:

What you have described is not a contention problem!

lynchie

scary wrote:

Cyberghost...what part of clondalkin are you in?

rgds
scary

yeah, what part? i know that they have enabled monastery gate / woodford, so hopefully there are working towards the village and hopefully towards cherrywood!!

CyberGhost

lynchie wrote:

yeah, what part? i know that they have enabled monastery gate / woodford, so hopefully there are working towards the village and hopefully towards cherrywood!!

I'm in the Village, so you're next

Joebloggs4817 wrote:

Still, a call to the Gardai could be in order there....

She gave me some phone number, I rang there yesterday but no one picked up, today I'll try again and if it is still nothing, I'll probably ring Gardai.

Just so you know guys, if someone calls, just say no to the offer and ring ntl yourself.

Anarchist

bk wrote:

Contention is an issue with all BB services. I have never heard of anyone ever getting anything less then the full speed on NTL, this is actually better then DSL, where you only get about 70 - 80% of the speed due to overheads.

As long as the network is well managed, contention shouldn't be a problem for any BB company.

I get my full whack with Smart even a little extra
I get 6.04 for my 6mb line.

Nietzschean

Dispite all the rediculing of the poster who mention'd contention issues with NTL i've had plenty of them on and off for 6 months now. Support are no help (i had a period of constant 400ms pings and 20k/sec downloads for 2 weeks). And most evenings my pings increase significantly ~100ms to most irish servers between 5 and 11pm most nights in the past week.

andrew163

Nietzschean wrote:

Dispite all the rediculing of the poster who mention'd contention issues with NTL i've had plenty of them on and off for 6 months now. Support are no help (i had a period of constant 400ms pings and 20k/sec downloads for 2 weeks). And most evenings my pings increase significantly ~100ms to most irish servers between 5 and 11pm most nights in the past week.

THAT sounds like a contention issue alright. The reason the other guy is getting ridiculed is because he was talking through his ass.

UberNewb

Nietzschean is definitly a contention problem. An outtage isn't or not being able to connect.

TempestSabre

My frigging typo, I meant high pings. Doh. Mine where 100-300 and were never consistent. Might be 40 one minute 200 the next. Especially worse at peak. Yes I'm no expert at this, so shoot me.

Nietzschean. Some of my problems were caused by a the connection to the local cable. My understanding of it is that your signal should be within certain levels. There should also be a certain resistance in the local box. Lots of things can effect it, including other connections before and after yours. If its not right you'll also have problems with your TV signal especially at the ends of the freq. So channels like CH4 and Discovery. I found complaining about the TV got more results and eventually (after complaining about BB for months with no effect) they came out and replaced the box which was being effected by water. That improved my TV. That engineer reported back some other problems which would require another engineer who dealt with broadband to make some further adjustments.

At the same time you should check the signal strength you get on your NTL modem. Downstream and Upstream signal has to between certain levels for it to work properly. I was having problems with my signal and the fix to box in the road fixed this. However I still had a lot of contention issues. As far I'm aware they did an upgrade to the backbone in the area as the service was oversubscribed.

That fixed most of my problems for a while But I think they are starting to occur again. What annoys me is that NTL will tell you theres no problems regardless of what the issues are. For example the line going dead for hours and then just being restored. Or not being able to connect for hours and then suddenly being able to connect no problem. My solution has been to stay connected 24/7 as I know if I disconnect the modem, reconnecting could take a long time. I'm seeing problems at peak times now. I gave up on onine games a long time ago, but I think its effecting my VOIP calls which is whats bugging me.

Originally I went through the route of swapping and changing all my gear, routers, cables, firewalls etc. But the problems still happened on a test machine connected directly to the modem with no firewall or routers involved. Other people in the area were having the same problems. So it points to problems with the network not with something our end. Especially when my current problems are primarily at peak. I got nowhere submitting ping logs and other stats to NTL either.

DemonOfTheFall

Yeah, I would have to say that my pings are in no way consistant with NTL. They're low, but they dont have any average point at all.

If I let a ping -t to clarity.jolt.co.uk run for 30 seconds i'll have lows of around 19ms and highs of 60ms.

None of that seems to affect me if I'm actually playing though. Pretty much all CS servers give me 45ms ping with 100/100 rates.

CyberGhost

Got it installed today... take that eircom!


But the guy didn't know the DNS server addresses Can anyone please tell me what are they?

shltter

194.168.4.100

194.168.8.100

Drapper

whats the advantage of using an DNS address?

Jumpy

Drapper wrote:

whats the advantage of using an DNS address?

The internet works for a start.

Drapper

Jumpy wrote:

The internet works for a start.

but the DNS is auto in the setup ; lol (god I'm so dumb)

PixelTrawler

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

Yeah, I would have to say that my pings are in no way consistant with NTL. They're low, but they dont have any average point at all.

If I let a ping -t to clarity.jolt.co.uk run for 30 seconds i'll have lows of around 19ms and highs of 60ms.

None of that seems to affect me if I'm actually playing though. Pretty much all CS servers give me 45ms ping with 100/100 rates.

I find the same thing altough the upper spikes can exceed 100ms. It affects some games badly - BF2, although HL2 seems seems not to mind ( prob same for CS ). Still BF2 is the one i play most...

So its not just me then....

Any point reporting this to NTL. Downloads are fine, page browsing is fast just latency is all over the place.

CyberGhost

shltter wrote:

194.168.4.100

194.168.8.100

erm... that does not look like it tbh.

Drapper, I want to hook up both cable and dsl into a switch and configure computers to use either one of them.

carrotcake

194.168.4.100
194.168.8.100

CyberGhost

Ah ffs, I was writing 192 instead of 194, that's why it wasn't working.

Thanks shltter & carrotcake

The Fool

Drapper wrote:

whats the advantage of using an DNS address?

you don't have to memorize thousands of ip addresses

Nietzschean

Joebloggs4817 wrote:

Any point reporting this to NTL

Not really, they will just woffle to you about contention. Though funnily enough they say on their site they support xbox live, with some of the pings i've had now n then that would be impossible, though its been fine this week so hopefully will remain so.

Drapper

The Fool wrote:

you don't have to memorize thousands of ip addresses

thanks mate.

PixelTrawler

Nietzschean wrote:

Not really, they will just woffle to you about contention. Though funnily enough they say on their site they support xbox live, with some of the pings i've had now n then that would be impossible, though its been fine this week so hopefully will remain so.

Then again their site also says "Suitable for Online Games" which it clearly is not...

I tried to get through twice but both times i was over 30 minutes on hold so i just gave up

Drapper

Joebloggs4817 wrote:

Then again their site also says "Suitable for Online Games" which it clearly is not...

I tried to get through twice but both times i was over 30 minutes on hold so i just gave up

get ping plotter and run it for 30 min - an hour, use http://www.pingplotter.com/, keep the results and paste an image up for all to see ! it will be clear if its an NTL or your PC issue ! plenty of Boardster will help you out! then call NTL and speak to a TEchie not a CS person. Your area may be oversubscribed. You can then push the "not suitable for gaming" arguement with evidence. Your right its plastered all over thier site.

SouperComputer

feck, im in clondalkin (behind green isle) but broadband is not available here. Ar$ebiscuits. Really wanted to scrap €ircon.

PixelTrawler

Drapper wrote:

get ping plotter and run it for 30 min - an hour, use http://www.pingplotter.com/, keep the results and paste an image up for all to see ! it will be clear if its an NTL or your PC issue ! plenty of Boardster will help you out! then call NTL and speak to a TEchie not a CS person. Your area may be oversubscribed. You can then push the "not suitable for gaming" arguement with evidence. Your right its plastered all over thier site.

sounds like a plan... Thanks Drapper...

fairly sure it aint the pc as I had rock solid pings with eircom which I had til the end of January.

DemonOfTheFall

I know I was a bit negative about them, I think I came off a bit too harsh. I still do find their service fantastic. I play CS with 100/100 rates and still ping 45-50 to all the english servers. I never notice it spiking or lagging ingame, only if I'm looking at the results of running pinplotter or ping -t.

Another thing I can't fault them on is that the connection doesn't "clog up" nearly as easily as I find DSL to. If I have a newsgroup download running capped at 300k a second VOIP is still usable and pings remain under 60. Can't fault that at all.

PixelTrawler

ran pingplotter to www.heanet.ie for half an hour

hopeless connection tonight - apart from 2% packetloss i was getting an average of 70ms with pings between 30 and 323!

Mind you its a latency problem only... downloading, browsing is fine...

But still thats pretty bad

CyberGhost

hmm, I was getting kinda bad connection yesterday night too

For such a praised product, I'm not too impressed to be honest with you guys.

Eircom's pings are much more stable.

PixelTrawler

i was expecting a lot more too. Are these problems new on ntl as previous NTL could not be praised high enough here, and now a fair few people are starting to complain.

Is it a case they've over subscribed? Have they caught IBB syndrome?

If this is the case they should hold off any proposed upgrades to be honest. If everyone on 3 Meg jumps to 10 you can imagine the whole network grinding to a halt ( as in whats happening in parts of the uk )

Drapper

Joebloggs4817 wrote:

ran pingplotter to www.heanet.ie for half an hour

hopeless connection tonight - apart from 2% packetloss i was getting an average of 70ms with pings between 30 and 323!

Mind you its a latency problem only... downloading, browsing is fine...

But still thats pretty bad

put the graph up of the pings as an image please !