NTL broadband slowdown

witless1

Anyone else in the city experiencing exceptional slowdown with the NTL broadband in the last couple of weeks?
In that my 6mb line is pulling down maybe 20kb in a speed test most nights. The connection is very flaky and is lagging like hell when it comes to playing online games. It will be fine one minute and plummet the next. A neighbour has the exact same problem and the NTL person i rang said there ain't any problem with the exchange. I know an NTL engineer and he said they are basically over subscribed!!
I reckon it could be the sale and switch from NTL UK to the Irish operations, I think chello is looking after it now.

peepsbates

i play games at night mostly and its fine for me for games,very little lag.
im on the 6mb package too,where are u checkin your speed?

Cabaal

They did change over lately and this did cause some problems alright but I've found more NTL connection more stable over the past weeks then the 4 weeks before that where it was up and down like no one's business

peepsbates

Cabaal wrote:

They did change over lately and this did cause some problems alright but I've found more NTL connection more stable over the past weeks then the 4 weeks before that where it was up and down like no one's business

Agreed, seems to be much better since change over. hope it continues

sham69

Got mine 2 weeks ago, its supposed to be a 6MB line but only seems to be a 3MB. I am using http://www.irishisptest.com/login.php?meh=0 to test my speed. I am going to ring NTL and let them know as I am not willing to pay for a 6MB line when only getting 3MB. Is the website above giving an accurate reflection of the actual line speed.

witless1

During the morning the speed is above 5Mb and in the evening 3Mb would be aboutright for a 6Mb line when you take in contention ratios and all that so thats a pretty enough connection all things considering.
I am checking them off of speedtest.ie and Smart's one http://support.smarttelecom.ie/myspeed/www/bbspeedtool.htm
Both are showing pretty much the same story. It aint too bad tonight (granted i have only been on about 10 minutes). The last few nights have been ok(ish) with the odd spike here and there. When it was real bad last month i kept getting onto them and eventually they conceded that they were oversubscribed and are aware that there is a problem but to hold tight on it. I even got a free months credit which is due on the next bill, so complain away. I find sending them emails every now and again is the handiest way cause last time i rang it took 50 minutes to get through to an operator!!

merlante

witless1 wrote:

During the morning the speed is above 5Mb and in the evening 3Mb would be aboutright for a 6Mb line when you take in contention ratios and all that so thats a pretty enough connection all things considering.
I am checking them off of speedtest.ie and Smart's one http://support.smarttelecom.ie/myspeed/www/bbspeedtool.htm
Both are showing pretty much the same story. It aint too bad tonight (granted i have only been on about 10 minutes). The last few nights have been ok(ish) with the odd spike here and there. When it was real bad last month i kept getting onto them and eventually they conceded that they were oversubscribed and are aware that there is a problem but to hold tight on it. I even got a free months credit which is due on the next bill, so complain away. I find sending them emails every now and again is the handiest way cause last time i rang it took 50 minutes to get through to an operator!!

Contention may well affect latency, but if you're paying for 6Mb then surely you should get 6Mb.

Otherwise it would be like selling two people a 6Mb line...

sham69

Gonna give them a ring and let them know that I am not paying for a 6mb line when only getting 3, I understand you never actually get close to the actual speed advertised but 50% loss is a bit of a joke. Does anybody know who the best person to ring is i.e Support or Customer Service and what the number is .
Cheers.

witless1

Ring 1800321321 and when you get through ask to be put to the broadband support team as dealing with the people in general customer support is like banging your head off of the wall. I complained about the speed and the lag while playing the xbox before and was told to delete my temporary internet files!! I didnt even answer her and just asked to be put through to her supervisor. The best time to ring them is before 1 in the day cause ringing in the evening guarantees lots of waiting.

peepsbates

merlante wrote:

Contention may well affect latency, but if you're paying for 6Mb then surely you should get 6Mb.

Otherwise it would be like selling two people a 6Mb line...

you wont get 6 mb on a 6 mb line

i usually get about 4.2 btw

Bards

Surley all these ISP's are in Breach of the Consumer acts

http://www.oasis.gov.ie/consumer_affairs/consumer_rights_and_protection/consumer_advertising.html


advertising services which are not true!!!

AdMMM

I'm currently on 10mb and it's very stable.

witless1

How are you still on the 10Mb?
I know everyone who was on the 6Mb was upped to 10 for a good while, but a while back everyone i know who had the 10Mb in was pushed back to the 6Mb package.
Log into your modem (192.168.100.1) click operation config. That will tell you your speed:
Mine looks like this:
Network Access : Allowed
Maximum Downstream Data Rate : 6144000
Maximum Upstream Data Rate : 538000

It used to say 1024000 for ages until they cut it back.

Oh and last night was the worst i experienced it in a long time. I was trying to play a few Xbox live games and kept getting lagged out and had a constant red line connection while playing halo. I had the pc on and ran a few speedtests, the fastest my line hit from 7pm to 11pm was 1.2Mb/s and the upload was scandalous, below 50kb/s on most runs.

peepsbates

I rekon your best bet is to get on to ntl about it, is there anyone else still on 10mb?

Aquos76

|.Murderer.| wrote:

I'm currently on 10mb and it's very stable.

I think you should check again. 10 meg is no more I'm afraid.

peepsbates

Aquos76 wrote:

I think you should check again. 10 meg is no more I'm afraid.

aye thats what i thought

[IMG][/img]
this is what im gettin today^^^srry bout the size it says 4.69 downstream

witless1

At this very moment in time my speeds are:
download speed 358kbps
upload speed 25.1kbps

Was just playing Halo 2 for the past hour and everything was grand until about 15 minutes ago, just ran that speed test five minutes ago.
Mad aint it?
I am going to ring them during the week and cancel the broadband and switch back to eircom, i need the broadband for computer projects when i go back to college in september. Did anyone here try and break their 12 month contract with NTL?
How do ya reckon i would be fixed after about 15 complaint emails and the fact they offered me a months credit a while back.

peepsbates

witless1 wrote:

At this very moment in time my speeds are:
download speed 358kbps
upload speed 25.1kbps

Was just playing Halo 2 for the past hour and everything was grand until about 15 minutes ago, just ran that speed test five minutes ago.
Mad aint it?
I am going to ring them during the week and cancel the broadband and switch back to eircom, i need the broadband for computer projects when i go back to college in september. Did anyone here try and break their 12 month contract with NTL?
How do ya reckon i would be fixed after about 15 complaint emails and the fact they offered me a months credit a while back.

id say give it a shot as those speeds are fairly nasty,i was with eircom before ntl on the 2mb package and the only reason i swiched was the price tbh, i cant fault eircoms service at all, let us know how you get on;)

witless1

Just rang their support line there and told them the problems i have been having. Their broadband "support" team are going to call me back within 24 to 48 hours, which is typical of their turnaround. I asked about potentially cancelling the contract despite being in the 12 month contract period and the girl said i would have to contact the cancellations department and that if the service is not meeting your expecatations and that you feel the TOS has been breached you should have no problem cancelling it. So now i have to wait for them to ring me back.

edit: I took the liberty of ringing them back and got through to their broadband support team after waiting for a bit. The man i was talking to was really helpful and got me to do a couple of HTTP downlaods from Heanet and saw that the line was working properly at the moment. He got me to hang on a few seconds while he loaded in the graphs of the broadband speed for my line. He informed me that my node is one of the least utilised nodes with only 30% uptake. He said that the speed's in the evening were perfect, BUT has noticed a weird noise level that is appearing like clockwork every evening that is affecting the signal in the line. Essentially someone or something is doing something to the line whether they know it or not is another thing. From the graphs he could not tell the origin but said something is definitly dodgy. He reckons it could be someone trying to tap into the line or running something at a frequency that is disrupting the line's signal strength. He said it is definitly a cause for concern and is getting onto the network team to look into it and find the cause. Progress at last after weeks of complaints and getting the usual there is no problem in your area replies.

peepsbates

what part of the city are you in if you dont mind me askin?im around yellow rd area

christophicus

My speed has been fairly brutal for the last few days. Im on the 6 Mb/s package and am getting about 1.5 Mb/s down!!! Bloody rediculous!! Ive never had even close top the top speeds though. When everyone had the 10 Mb lines the fastest connection i was getting was around 4 Mb/s down and that was at about 1-2 am!! this is quite a pathetic spped from NTL!

merlante

If it's 6mb then it's 6mb. There's no way getting less than that should be normal. I have a 2mb DSL line and my router reports 2mb -- proper order! If you are only only getting 4mb then you are not getting the service that was advertised!

If you bought a 2Ghz CPU and it ran at 1.7Ghz you wouldn't be happy would you?

btw. for you gamers out there, that don't already know, there are three things that can affect gameplay across a network: bandwidth, latency and jitter. If you have a 4, 6 whatever mb connection, then most of your problems will generally be the last two...

witless1

Im pretty near ya in the Newport Terrace area.

When the line is running ok i can hit 4Mb or 5Mb most evenings, in the morning i will hit close on the 6Mb. When we were all on the 10Mb line i was averaging 8.5Mb at all times on it. I think it has to do with the fact my line is only at 30% capacity (according to the helpdesk guy).
My neighbour around the corner has the same problem i am having and always at the same time. We were chatting today and I was telling him how my convo went with NTL and we got thinking. A neighbour between our 2 houses recently got in wireless broadband, maybe his signal could be causing the noise on our line causing it to spike every now and again. Its too much of a coincidence that when he gets home within an hour the broadband is crap, and at weekends lately it has been occuring early in the day when he is home!!

peepsbates

merlante wrote:

If it's 6mb then it's 6mb. There's no way getting less than that should be normal. I have a 2mb DSL line and my router reports 2mb -- proper order! If you are only only getting 4mb then you are not getting the service that was advertised!

If you bought a 2Ghz CPU and it ran at 1.7Ghz you wouldn't be happy would you?

btw. for you gamers out there, that don't already know, there are three things that can affect gameplay across a network: bandwidth, latency and jitter. If you have a 4, 6 whatever mb connection, then most of your problems will generally be the last two...

i doubt if you get the full 2mb,have you tried speed test?whats your results?

merlante

witless1 wrote:

Im pretty near ya in the Newport Terrace area.

When the line is running ok i can hit 4Mb or 5Mb most evenings, in the morning i will hit close on the 6Mb. When we were all on the 10Mb line i was averaging 8.5Mb at all times on it. I think it has to do with the fact my line is only at 30% capacity (according to the helpdesk guy).
My neighbour around the corner has the same problem i am having and always at the same time. We were chatting today and I was telling him how my convo went with NTL and we got thinking. A neighbour between our 2 houses recently got in wireless broadband, maybe his signal could be causing the noise on our line causing it to spike every now and again. Its too much of a coincidence that when he gets home within an hour the broadband is crap, and at weekends lately it has been occuring early in the day when he is home!!

Highly unlikely I'd say. (NTL) Coaxial cable is EM shielded, and the wireless signals aren't that strong. Plus the frequencies would have to be really close.

AdMMM

We're on 10mb because my mother-in-law works for NTL and managed to get the speed maxed out. At times our NTL digital feed is atrocious though, probably totally unrelated though and I've never thought to check if the broadband feed is affected when the TV feed is.

matu

I was looking into getting NTL broadband but after reading the above posts I dont think I will, seems to be very unstable.

Aquos76

I wold have to say that my Ntl connection has been A1 for the last couple of weeks. I am on the 3mg package and my D/L speeds are always up over the 350KBps mark when I am DL from somewhere like Heanet or Microsoft.

christophicus

Just did a test o www.speedtest.ie and my 6 MB line has been rated as a 350Kb/sec line!!!!

AdMMM

Bear in mind that they are trying to migrate all their services into the UPC mould so that could very well be why you aren't getting satifactory / full rated speed.

witless1

christophicus now you know how i feel most nights!!! For a 6Mb line at peak times with everyone online (close on full utilisation) that is on the node i still expect around the 2Mb mark. Aint a lot to ask for really.
I accept slowdown and understand contention and that, but dropping from 6Mb to 350kb (which is fast considering mine drops a lot lower) is mental!!
I was told by NTL to keep a record of HTTP speeds by downloading from Heanet. Right now i am averaging 650kb/s which is great for a 6Mb line. In the evening time he said that this should not drop drastically. Last night it dropped to an average of 45kb/s. So if you are ringing aboutthe speeds thats what you need to throw at them rather then saying speedtest.ie says i have this speed. That and make logs of trace routes (run tracert www.google.com in the command prompt) and email them the results when you go to complain.

christophicus

witless1 wrote:

christophicus now you know how i feel most nights!!! For a 6Mb line at peak times with everyone online (close on full utilisation) that is on the node i still expect around the 2Mb mark. Aint a lot to ask for really.
I accept slowdown and understand contention and that, but dropping from 6Mb to 350kb (which is fast considering mine drops a lot lower) is mental!!

No no no i think you missunderstand me i was not getting 350 KB i was getting 350Kb (I.e the number 350 ,under the 1 MB mark on speed test). Id be very happy if I got 350 KB (even though im paying for a 580-600KB line) but recently im getting 150KB

Has NTL done anything about your speed?

witless1

Oh right, must have misread ya
Nope not yet i have ben advised that netowrk engineers are looking into my line and node to try and find the source of the problem. Thing was on the 10Mb line i had no problems at all, i might try and use that to get them to upgrade the line free of charge of course
I had the last 2 weeks off of work before i go back to college so have been sitting up playing the xbox late most nights, lag is horrendous especially if i get host, cause the speed drops every now and again on the upload side of things which means everyone else lag's horribly and i get accused of standbying and cheating! funny in a kind of sad way really.
In saying that the last 2 nights have been ok, just the occasional dip but it aint lasting for too long. I won't hold my breath just yet.
Wil lkeep ye informed though.

witless1

Okay update time:
I am sitting at home this evening and the helpdesk from NTL rang me. The chap on the line said that he had my line monitored for the past 7 days continious and was just lookingat the results there. Every evening the broadband would spike and in his words "go nuts" between 8pm and midnight, after that it would level off for a bit and become usable but from 3am to 9am the line was going mental. He was tlaking to some colleagues and they know the general problem but not the source. What he said the data pointed to was everyone on the node maxing out their bandwidth simultaneously, but the graphs for the node showed the busiest utilisation wise it hit in a week was 65%. So tomorrow they are sending out 2 engineers to inspect the outside cabling, as they figure the problem aint with the wires inside my house, but is with the area of cable going from the NTL connection to my house. He also said that he would contact billing when all this is finished and said there is not way i can be expected to pay for a service that i have not being receiving for 60% of the day.
Success at last so keep annoying them and get them to monitor the line if you are totally unhappy with the service they are offering.
Again i will keep ppl posted and hopefully this will sort my problems out

christophicus

YEs please do keep us posted I would very much like to kno if this gets sorted out. At least it looks as though you eventually got through to someone that knew what they are doing. That is incouraging , although it is not incouraging that they dont really seem to know what the problem is.

Psychedelic

does anyone know if NTL broadband is available in Tramore????

and what other providers currently offer bb in Tramore?

i'm about to get cut off perlico tomorrow, after having left eircom due to the line rental, but perlico sucks so need a new provider asap.

as far as i know, digiweb do wireless in Tramore, but is it any good? and do they offer a dsl service out here?


any help or advice greatly appreciated....

AdMMM

NTL do NOT offer broadband services in Tramore as they only use the aging MMDS system out there which does not have sufficent bandwidth to cater for broadband.

Tramore's exchange has been DSL enabled for the last 2 years so you should be able to get DSL for sure. If your line passes then you can get broadband from any of the DSL resellers in Ireland - Digiweb included.

As for suggestions about a package, considering you left Eircom because of line rental, have you considered BT?

Psychedelic

cheers for the advice.

i forgot about BT, i'll check out what they offer. are they any good?

thanks again for the help.

Freddie59

christophicus wrote:

No no no i think you missunderstand me i was not getting 350 KB i was getting 350Kb (I.e the number 350 ,under the 1 MB mark on speed test). Id be very happy if I got 350 KB (even though im paying for a 580-600KB line) but recently im getting 150KB

Has NTL done anything about your speed?

Hello Christophicus.

When I checked 6 Megs NTL for a friend on www.irishisptest.ie recently I was getting 1.9 Megs. However, when downloading (as a test) the iTunes software from www.apple.com/itunes I get a transfer rate of 730Kbps (which is equivalent to 5.8 Megs). Hope that helps.:)

christophicus

Ive been testing with files off if Heanet aslwell,and its still really slow.

Roen

I got a 1.4Mb result from Irishspeedtest.ie for my 3Mb line, yet when I download from Heanet ftp I get about 350-370k/sec, which is pretty spot on. I have noticed ping time become erratic, especially in the evening.

christophicus

Doing a test off of heanet now and it has stabilised at about 270 , and thats on what supposedly is a 6Mb line!!!

Freddie59

christophicus wrote:

Ive been testing with files off if Heanet aslwell,and its still really slow.

Have you tested the speed on your line with another PC - say a laptop?

christophicus

No i havent , i dont have any other pc. I know that my pc can handle a better speed though cause when everyone was getting 10 mb i once got 400KB down, so it stands to reason that if it was my PC that is the bottle neck then i should be getting 400 KB still.

Roen

Still the same, 1.4Mb from a 3Mb line from Irishisptest.ie, yet a steady 370k/sec from Heanet ftp servers. I'll ring em on Monday and see what they have to say.

Aquos76

Well if you are getting 370KBps that is 3mb. I usally dont bother with those speed tests site anymore. NTL will only get you to try downloading from Heanet and as you have said yourself, those speeds are fine.

Mossy Monk

exactly. nothing wrong with that speed you are getting Roen

Roen

That's why I said "yet a steady 370k/sec" I was indicating that even though it was reading 1.4Mb I was getting the full download speed. I meant I was going to ring them over the ping issue, not the speed.
I have to use a download manager now because most times a download will just hang mid way and I have to start all over again I wouldn't have to use one if I had a reliable service.
Cheers for the responses anyway.

Dan133269

you've started something of a revolution against NTL here Leigh, and rightly so I must add. Their cable television service is not of the highest standard either

Freddie59

Roen wrote:

Still the same, 1.4Mb from a 3Mb line from Irishisptest.ie, yet a steady 370k/sec from Heanet ftp servers. I'll ring em on Monday and see what they have to say.

370 Kbps = 2.96 MBps. How did you get on with them?

Freddie59

christophicus wrote:

No i havent , i dont have any other pc. I know that my pc can handle a better speed though cause when everyone was getting 10 mb i once got 400KB down, so it stands to reason that if it was my PC that is the bottle neck then i should be getting 400 KB still.

Not so. A good friend of mine has a desktop running W98 on a 2 Meg NTL circuit - VIA usb. This consistently clocks only 1.25 Megs. However, if he plugs his work XP laptop - via Ethernet - into it, he gets 1.95 Megs - constantly.